OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
Vice President Kamala Harris is working hard to change her image, and her policies, now that she is competing for the presidency, with a chameleon-like transformation that has critics pointing out her many hypocrisies.
The Washington Examiner reported that the policies that got her precisely no delegates during the 2019 Democratic primary, because she dropped out before votes were cast, are being revamped. This includes ‘stealing’ one of former President Donald Trump’s campaign priorities—eliminating taxes on tips received by service industry employees.
The first example is the mandatory gun buyback program she supported when she was campaigning for president in 2019.
“We have to have a buy-back program and I support a mandatory buy-back program,” she said during that campaign at a forum in Las Vegas
It is a policy that former President Donald Trump highlighted at a Georgia rally this year when he said, “She supports mandatory gun confiscation … Would anybody mind if they came into your house and took away your gun? … She’s for taking away all of your guns.”
But a campaign official who spoke to Fox News on the matter said that the vice president no longer supports that plan.
Another position she has walked back from 2019 is her support for a ban on fracking.
“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” she said back then.
But, again, a campaign official said that she no longer supports a ban on fracking and then took aim at the former president who supports oil.
“Trump’s false claims about fracking bans are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class.” The spokesperson said to The Hill.
“The Biden-Harris Administration passed the largest ever climate change legislation and under their leadership, America now has the highest ever domestic energy production,” they said. “This Administration created 300,000 energy jobs, while Trump lost nearly a million and his Project 2025 would undo the enormous progress we’ve made the past four years.”
Harris also no longer favors a “Medicare for all” single-payer healthcare system that she supported during the 2019 campaign.
In 2019, she said that all ideas, including expanding the Supreme Court from nine Justices, were “on the table.
“We are on the verge of a crisis of confidence in the Supreme Court. We have to take this challenge head-on, and everything is on the table to do that,” she said during that campaign, but now she says she is not in favor of “packing” the court.
She has pivoted to proposing ethics reforms for the court along with President Joe Biden.
“Harris no longer supports a federal job guarantee, an idea championed by some on the Left and Green New Deal proponents that gained traction among Democrats during the 2020 election cycle. A spokesperson for Harris’s campaign confirmed the position change exclusively to the Washington Examiner,” the report said.
“A federal jobs guarantee would mean the federal government would provide a job to anyone who wants one, a massively costly proposal that harkens back to the New Deal policies of the 1930s,” it said.
The vice president said in 2020 that she was also supportive of the idea of redirecting funds from the police to other programs during the “defund the police” movement that followed the George Floyd riots.
“This whole movement is about rightly saying we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” she said back then.
But now she has switched her position.
“Her position has always been that you can both be tough and smart on crime, and it requires funding police,” Mitch Landrieu, national co-chair for the Biden-Harris campaign, said last month.
In a recent report, Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy highlighted these massive policy changes.
“Staffers insist Harris has moderated and no longer supports those positions, but the presumptive nominee hasn’t said that or explained why,” said Doocy.
“Vice President Harris has been talking so much lately about her life before she was VP, as a prosecutor, as a senator. But what she keeps leaving out is that back then, she appears to have had a very different worldview,” he added.