Following her support of a crackdown on immigration that would entail expanding the contentious US southern border wall—a project that she had previously criticized as “un-American” and “a medieval vanity project”—Republicans have accused Kamala Harris of engaging in a policy policy-flop.
Although a bipartisan immigration compromise failed in the Senate earlier this year, Harris pledged at last week’s Democratic national convention to try again.
This deal, which was a compromise between the Republican-controlled Congress and Joe Biden’s administration, would have been the most severe crackdown on illegal immigration in recent memory. It all fell apart when Republican lawmakers withdrew their support in response to pressure from Donald Trump, the former president and Republican candidate for the November election. Trump was adamant that Democrats not be given credit for an issue that could have won him the race.
Republican US senator from Oklahoma, James Lankford, said that by reviving it, Harris is pledging to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the border wall, which was one of Trump’s favorite projects while he was president.
“The Trump border wall is necessary,” Lankford informed Axios. Here is where it will be constructed; the measure specifies the criteria that were established by the Trump administration. While the Trump administration is building it, this is how it must be constructed: the exact height, style, and type.
According to Lankford’s office, the measure allocated only $650 million for wall spending, which is far less than the $18 billion that Trump had asked for in 2018 during his presidency.
But for Harris, investing money on the building at all is a radical change from her vehement opposition when serving as US senator for California.
She vowed to oppose financing and criticized it as “a stupid waste of money” shortly after becoming a senator in 2017.
In her 2019 announcement of her first presidential run, she called it a “medieval vanity project.” Her Facebook post from February 2020 stated, “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer.”
However, in her most recent TV advertising, she presents herself as a “border-state prosecutor” and the wall is featured alongside her.
This seems to be the latest in a string of policy U-turns by Harris, who had previously had liberal views when she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 but lost.
After Biden stopped his re-election campaign in July and endorsed Harris to succeed him, she ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket. However, she has since been accused of flip-flopping for supposedly reversing her earlier positions on Medicare for all and a ban on fracking, adopting a more centrist position.
A surge of illegal border crossings has been blamed on Harris, who the Trump campaign has attacked by branding her the “border czar” of the Biden administration. In response, Harris has taken a harsh stance on immigration.
As for Trump, his campaign has recently tried to catch him off guard by reversing his tendency for teasing and ridicule.
The most recent development is that the campaign mocked the ex-president for his threat to cancel an ABC debate on September 10th, which he threatened to do by airing interviews in which he voiced his concerns to the programming while clucking chickens made a background noise.
To counter Harris’s lack of significant media interviews since becoming the Democratic nominee, the Trump team has pointed out that the former president has given a flurry of interviews recently.
