What Does Harris Think About The First Amendment? Her Record Screams: ‘Not Much.’
By Kristen Waggoner via The Daily Signal | November 02, 2024
Americans have grown accustomed to empty sloganeering from candidates during election seasons. But we know that what a candidate says on the campaign trail means little. What they do in office—and with the office—is what matters.
Vice President Kamala Harris has built a lengthy record over decades in various elected offices. We don’t have to wonder what she would do. We already know what she has done.
Harris has consistently undermined the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. That should alarm every American.
As I told Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn: “Throughout her career as a public official, Kamala Harris has long used government power to try to coerce people of faith to violate their consciences, especially regarding abortion and gender ideology.”
That statement isn’t sloganeering. We have the receipts.
The Biden-Harris Treasury Department conspired with major banks to flag transactions of ordinary citizens making purchases at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Bass Pro Shops, and Cabela’s, and buying “religious texts” like Bibles, under the guise of identifying potential “domestic terrorists.”
The Justice Department under the Biden-Harris administration similarly went after parents who spoke up at school board meetings in an infamous 2021 memo, equating their advocacy on behalf of their kids with “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence.”
Harris has repeatedly advocated for suppression as a government response to what she considers “disinformation, misinformation, and ‘malinformation’”—terms that are vaguely defined and broadly applicable.
“Malinformation,” for those who haven’t heard the term, is a new weapon in the censors’ arsenal, defined as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
So, if a politician or a bureaucrat doesn’t like a true and factual statement, the First Amendment is void? It’s hard to imagine a more corrosive attack on free speech, but Harris has been all in.
In a speech to the NAACP, she said that social media platforms “have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.”
Who would Harris classify as a “threat to our democracy”? Presumably, the same people her administration labeled as potential “domestic terrorists”; namely, concerned parents, nonprofit charitable organizations, and guys who like to camp, among others.
She continued in the same speech: “If you don’t police your platforms, we will hold you accountable.”
By “we,” she meant the government. And the administration has made good on the threat.
As the explosive “Twitter Files” documented, the Biden-Harris administration indeed colluded with social media companies to suppress ideas and voices that didn’t conform to the “official” narrative around several issues of public interest that required free and open debate.
If you think getting caught taught the administration a lesson, you’d be wrong.
An Oct. 22 investigative report by independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Paul D. Thacker uncovered a plot by a group of foreign advisers to the vice president to “Kill Musk’s Twitter” and to solicit the help of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., one of the leading proponents of online speech suppression.
That same day, during an interview with NBC, when asked whether she supported a “religious exemption” for medical professionals who choose not to participate in abortion, Harris responded, “I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.”
Let’s understand the radical nature of her statement. In this nation, we have never forced anyone to take innocent human life in violation of their conscience.
This is not a newfound authoritarian bug that Harris picked up while running for president in 2019 and after being elected vice president in 2020. It’s been a feature of her political career.
As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Harris badgered at least three judicial nominees for having been members of the respected Catholic nonprofit Knights of Columbus, which has more than 2 million members. Harris may be unaware, but the Constitution expressly prohibits religious tests for holding public office.
Legislatively, then-Sen. Harris sponsored the Do No Harm Act, a bill that would gut the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—one of the most important federal safeguards for religious freedom—primarily for the benefit of the abortion industry.
She also cosponsored the Equality Act, which would wipe out freedom of conscience and free speech by giving the federal government the power to police and punish the beliefs of disfavored Americans who have not submitted to the new sexual orthodoxy.
As attorney general of California, Harris celebrated the passage of the Reproductive FACT Act, which effectively required pro-life pregnancy resource centers to advertise for abortionists, and defended it in court on more than one occasion.
In one case, A Woman’s Friend Pregnancy Resource Clinic v. Harris, a federal court upheld the law, which would have forced pregnancy help centers to comply with a bizarre array of coerced-speech mandates.
Thankfully, the law was subsequently found unconstitutional in 2018 by the U.S. Supreme Court in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra (originally v. Harris, as her office handled the case at the trial court level), a case successfully litigated by Alliance Defending Freedom.
In 2015, journalist David Daleiden exposed Planned Parenthood’s grisly practice of selling the body parts of aborted babies in a series of undercover videos. Did Harris, as attorney general, investigate Planned Parenthood for trafficking fetal organs?
No. She went after Daleiden in 2016—instead of her abortion industry allies and donors—raiding his home and seizing his equipment. And eight years later, his legal troubles are far from over. Daleiden still faces eight felony charges in an unprecedented case.
Politicians say a lot of things, especially during election season. When it comes to Harris, no matter what she says now about her respect for the Constitution and “our democracy,” her long record of hostility to our fundamental freedoms tells a different story.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
Kristen Waggoner is the board chair of ADF Action.
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