Joe Biden apparently woke up from his nap this afternoon and remembered that he hadn’t yet named a vice presidential running mate yet. With the Democrat national convention starting on Monday (which Joe won’t be leaving his basement to attend) he just announced that his running mate in the November election will be California Senator Kamala Harris.
Joe Biden chooses Kamala Harris as his vice president https://t.co/JsHBQSqgrw pic.twitter.com/zyjlWjNwet
— New York Post (@nypost) August 11, 2020
Harris doesn’t bring much in the way of electoral appeal to the table. Despite early front-runner status conferred on her by many in the media, her uninspiring campaign flamed out with few mourning the loss.
Being a California Senator, though, she brings solid anti-gun rights credentials to the table to compliment Biden’s regulatory and confiscatory instincts where firearms are concerned.
In fact, the usual smorgasbord of Second Amendment infringements — including an “assault weapons” ban, magazine capacity limits, a national “red flag” law, among others — aren’t enough for Harris. During her campaign, she showed as much contempt for the First Amendment as she has for the Second, advocating the confiscation of firearms for those who express unpopular political opinions.
As Reason Magazine noted, Harris favors . . .
…legislation that would authorize federal courts to issue gun confiscation orders against people who express opinions that may indicate an intent to commit a hate crime. These “domestic terrorism prevention orders” would “temporarily restrict a person’s access to guns if they exhibit clear evidence of dangerousness,” including “violent racist threats or anti-immigrant manifestos.”
Harris’ plan to “disarm violent hate” is pretty vague, so it’s hard to say whether it would be consistent with the First Amendment. If the bill she imagines would merely create a federal “red flag” law focused on a subset of people deemed a threat to others, that would be bad enough, since these laws generally give short shrift to due process. But her description of the problem she is trying to address suggests that constitutionally protected speech might by itself be enough to suspend someone’s Second Amendment rights.
What might once have seemed to be disqualifyingly radical positions on free speech and the right to keep and bear arms are now standard policy planks for any ambitious Democrat politician worth his or her salt.
No one actually expected old Joe to choose anyone with opinions on gun rights that were any more moderate than the wildly rights-infringing positions he’s already advocated. And in adding Harris to the ticket, he won’t have disappointed anyone at Everytown, Moms Demand Action, the Brady Campaign or Giffords.
Harris is just more of the same as far and gun control advocacy goes, only in a younger, more energetic, more coherent package. One that presses all of the right identity buttons that are demanded by the Democrat powers that be these days.