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Blumenthal and Harris |
Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s choice as Vice President, is no moderate. Her voting record in the US Senate places her one notch below Democrat Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who on her best day manages to sound like an inflamed librarian scolding a student for returning late a borrowed book.
Harris’ social policies place her on a par with U.S. Senator
Dick Blumenthal. Both have endorsed Alexandra Ocassio Cortez’s de-energizing Green
New Deal. At times, both have favored Medicare for all, a mask for universal
health care, and the consequent destruction of Connecticut’s still vibrant insurance
industry. Asked during the Democrat primary debate who favored abolishing
private health care to assure a government run plan, Harris raised her hand in
assent, along with socialist Sanders, but later backtracked and in July rolled
out a plan that largely left private insurance intact. Both favor the repeal of
tax cuts that juiced the national economy and made it possible for President
Donald Trump to boast, before the advent of Coronavirus, that Republican tax
cuts had, in President John Kennedy’s words, “lifted all the boats,” including
the economic aspirations of Blacks and Hispanics. Both Blumenthal and Harris regard favorably a
backdoor religious litmus test for Catholic judicial nominees.
Of course there are some differences. Blumenthal, for two
decades Connecticut’s Attorney General, is by marriage a privileged white
millionaire, and Harris is a privileged black female former California Attorney
General.
Both are radical pro-abortionists. Harris, according to a
recent piece in a conservative Washington
DC publication, thinks the federal
government should treat pro-lifers as though they were segregationists and,
though silent on ANTIFA, she has called the Knights of Columbus “extremists.”
Blumenthal, the Connecticut Attorney General who for two
decades lavished restrictions on businesses in his state, believes there should
be no restrictions at all on abortion, however reasonable, which demonstrates
how far he is out of sync with a clear majority of the US public, 70 percent of
whom would allow some restrictions. Members of the Knights of Columbus account for
only a miniscule portion of the 70 percent cited.
It was only a few years ago, during the Clinton
administration, that a Democrat president proclaimed the end of welfare as we
know it and assured the nation that abortion, if permitted and reasonably
restrained by enlightened legislators, would be safe – not, alas, for the
unborn – legal and rare. The misnamed Planned Parenthood Empire is financed in
great part through abortions. The butchering of fetuses and the selling of baby
parts to doctors would have been considered improbably extreme during the
Clinton administration.
One Washington DC publication reminds us in an editorial, “Kamala
Harris, the cancel culture cop”, that Attorney General Harris “prosecuted
and persecuted pro-life undercover filmmaker David Daleiden for his work
exposing Planned Parenthood’s trade in fetal remains. She seized his recordings
while pursuing the abortion lobby’s endorsement for Senate. She was also the
first prosecutor ever to use California’s eavesdropping laws against a
journalist, all after secret consultations with the abortion provider.”
On the whole, Harris has compiled a sterling record as a
pro-abortion extremist. Blumenthal must be jealous.
There are, no doubt, some Democrats who recall with
affection a time when their party was properly described as “liberal.” That day
has passed. The Democrat Party of Jack Kennedy has now been supplanted by
progressive leftists listing unapologetically towards socialism. It is as if
Jonah had swallowed the whale. The present Democrat convention platform indicates
the outsized influence the far left has had on what used to be called “the
vital center” in American politics.
The seamless progressive-socialist robe is on full display
in a Democrat Party platform that Democrats are willing to discuss only in general terms. Socialist Bernie Sanders’ campaign
director, Jeff Weaver, tells us that he has no problem with the present
platform. Weaver was “deeply involved in the intraparty negotiations both this
time and four years ago” according to a story in the LA Times. The way Biden's camp
“reached out and worked” to forge agreements with Sanders on much of the
party platform, Weaver said, leaves him with “no concerns.” Among leaders
within the new model Democrat Party, there are no longer any enemies to the
left. The progressive-socialist camel is resting comfortably within the
Democrat Party tent, and the further left the party of Jack Kennedy has moved,
the more illiberal it has become.
That is why, despite a recent Supreme Court ruling that
relieves The Little Sisters of Poor of the necessity of violating Catholic
precepts and a Christian conscience by distributing birth control pills to its
staff, Democrats, almost to a man, are insisting that the court will, under a
progressive-socialist regime reverse this opinion, even if, given a majority in
both houses of Congress, they must pack the court to achieve their aim. That
effort, they hope, will be led by their new “Catholic” President Biden who,
only recently, pledged to repeal the Hatch Act, which prevents the federal
funding of abortion and pinches the profits of Planned Parenthood.
There are political roads taken that will not admit of retreat;
such is the turn from liberalism to progressivism to socialism. Three quarters
of a century after Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, the socialist road still leads to serfdom.
To take the ideological temperature of the reformed Democrat
Party, one only has to ask politicians such as Blumenthal and Harris to produce
current denunciations of ANTIFA, a violent Marxist organization that has
hijacked protestors marching under the banner of “Black Lives Matter.” Counting
the media releases from Blumenthal’s office denouncing ANTIFA, how many would
turn up?
The party of Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton has become a
viper’s nest that provides safe spaces for odious, undemocratic and violent
brown-shirts and bullies.
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