WATCH: ‘She has not said that’: U.S. senator says Kamala hasn’t distanced herself from far-left views
Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton pointed out on ABC News Sunday that Vice President Kamala Harris has yet to distance herself from her once far-left views.
Questions have arisen around Harris’ campaign since she became her party’s presidential nominee, as she has not released an official policy platform or conducted an in-depth interview with the press. Cotton appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and challenged host Jonathan Karl’s claim that Harris has moved away from the far-left policies she supported in 2020 while running for president.
“This is not a radical convention. She — as you heard me go through with Bernie Sanders, she is not taking the positions of the far left of her party. She’s clearly making an effort to move to the middle,” Karl said.
“I did hear what you said to Senator Sanders, and I thought it was clear that he was very disappointed that she’s taking these efforts not to change her positions, but to hide her positions, Jon. The American people are totally justified to conclude that Kamala Harris is a dangerous San Francisco liberal based on what she campaigned on the last time she ran for president and what this administration has done the last four years,” Cotton said.
Cotton continued to state that Harris distanced herself from the Biden administration during last week’s Democratic National Convention, before criticizing her 2020 campaign promises, such as “decriminalizing illegal immigration.”
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“Again, you would have thought watching the Democratic convention last week that the Democrats are not in office, that they’re not in power, that they’re campaigning against an incumbent Republican. When in reality, she’s been part of the failures of the Biden-Harris Administration for four years, and she campaigned for president, in her own right, she did, in fact, promise things like decriminalizing illegal immigration —”
Karl then argued that it was “a position she’s clearly changed on and she said she has changed.” However, Cotton pushed back, noting that only aides have come forward to distance Harris from her campaign policies.
“No, no she has not. Jon, she has not said that. You pointed out to Senator Sanders repeatedly — things that her campaign has said. Anonymous aides speaking on background reporters have said, ‘Well, she no longer believes these things.’ Okay, maybe she has changed her position on health insurance and confiscating your gun. If she has changed her position, she owes it to the American people to come out and say in her own words when she changed and why she changed,” Cotton said.
“That’s one reason why she needs to address the American people and speak to these questions because the only basis they have to conclude what she will be like as president is what she’s done for four years in this administration and what she said in her own voice in the last campaign,” Cotton continued. “Remember, these are not, like, college essays, Jon. This is what she said when she was campaigning for president as a 54-year-old woman. If she’s had such a radical change of heart in the last five years, she owes the American people answers.”
Republicans have repeatedly called out Harris for flip-flopping on her policy stances as she once campaigned on a range of left-wing positions, including a ban on fracking, mandatory federal gun buybacks and abolishing private health insurance. Since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, her campaign and supporters have defended her, despite Harris not addressing the issues personally in a press interview.
In late July, Harris’ national campaign co-chair, Mitch Landrieu, was pressed during a CNN interview about Harris’ unconfirmed stance on defunding the police. Landrieu claimed her “actions indicate that she wants to fund the police, but she wants to do the other things as well because both of them together will create safety on the streets of America.”
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