In the Missoulian: Tester and Harris
Montana’s Jon Tester was important in launching Kamala Harris’ national political career. As chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2016, Tester recruited Harris to run for the California Senate seat. Her political views were already well known, and his relationship with her reportedly goes back many years. In 2020, Tester wrote: “My friend @KamalaHarris is a proven fighter and an excellent pick for Vice President.”
When Harris was in the Senate, GovTrack, a non-partisan organization that tracks bills in Congress, ranked her as the “most liberal compared to All Senators.” But Tester, who claims he is a moderate, could have supported more moderate Democrat Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, a member of the Blue Dog Coalition of moderate Democrats, but Harris was his choice. Democrats would have held the seat if either of those two Democrats had won.
How radically left has Harris been? While a senator, she supported banning fracking and off-shore drilling. Harris supports ending the filibuster to get the Green New Deal passed. She wants people to stop eating meat because raising cattle and other livestock damages the environment.
Biden is the most activist gun-control president ever, putting thousands of gun dealers out of business for trivial, non-consequential paperwork mistakes and creating a national gun registry, but during the 2020 presidential campaign, Harris ran to the left of Biden on gun control. While both supported an assault weapon ban, she wanted to force gun owners to sell firearms she deemed undesirable to the government. And that she could do all that with executive orders, bypassing Congress. Harris can’t separate herself from the Biden administration’s gun control policies, as she has been the administration’s “gun-control czar,” where she oversees the first-ever gun-control department run out of the White House, known as the Office of Gun Violence Prevention (OGVP).
But while she doesn’t think people should be able to protect themselves and these gun control laws make people less safe, she also supported defunding the police. “It is outdated, it is wrongheaded thinking to think that the only way you’re going to get communities to be safe is to put more police officers on the street … you have to invest in the health and wellbeing of that community,” Harris told voters in Michigan on Sept. 22, 2020. Similarly, in an interview with ABC News, she claimed: “we have confused the idea that to achieve safety you put more cops on the street.”
People may also remember how Kamala Harris urged people to donate to the MN Freedom Fund on June 1, 2020, to help bail out the George Floyd rioters.
The media may want to rewrite history, but Harris is Biden’s “border czar.” For example, when Biden announced her appointment in March 2021, Politico’s headline read: “Biden makes Harris the point person on immigration issues amid border surge.”
Harris, in 2018, compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to the Ku Klux Klan, and she told MSNBC in 2019, when asked if she supported abolishing ICE, that the United States should “probably think about starting from scratch” on enforcing immigration laws.
By August, 10 million illegal immigrants will have come into the U.S., but it doesn’t include likely millions more who weren’t observed.
With Tester up for re-election this year, he wants to portray himself as a moderate, but he voted with Biden 91% of the time, and that percentage was higher the farther he was from facing re-election.
But with Tester’s friend, Kamala Harris, at the top of the Democratic ticket, he won’t be able to run away from his hand in getting her to that position.
John R. Lott Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and lives in Missoula. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department.
John R. Lott, Jr., “Tester and Harris,” The Missoulian, July 31, 2024.
