Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Democrat presidential contender Joe Biden’s pick for vice president, has a troublesome relationship with the truth.
Kamala Harris falsely smeared U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings and retailed falsehoods about the president’s tax cuts a few months later.
Such is Harris’ strained affair with the facts that she has at least eight Pinocchios from the Washington Post, a signal to the leftist media to have its live fact checkers ready when she debates Vice President Mike Pence.
Lies About Kavanaugh
Harris’ snotty, imperious, high-handed treatment of Kavanaugh began with suggesting that the distinguished judge was not only unethical, but also might be a racist if he agreed with President Trump’s entirely accurate statement that good and bad people were on both sides of the leftist-inspired riots in Charlottesville in 2017.
But after that, and before she joined the smear campaign that falsely charged Kavanaugh with sexual assault and gang rape, she misrepresented his answer to a question from Senator Ted Cruz during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Cruz asked about Kavanaugh’s dissent in Priests for Life v. United States Department of Health and Human Services, one of the cases involving ObamaCare’s mandate that religious groups provide contraceptive and abortion coverage.
Kavanaugh explained that ObamaCare would require the priests’ group to fill out a form that they believed “would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs” they opposed as a religious matter.
[Priests for Life] was being forced to provide a certain kind of health coverage over their religious objection to their employees, and under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the question was first, was this a substantial burden on the religious exercise? And it seemed to me quite clearly it was. It was a technical matter of filling out a form, in that case with — that — they said filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were — as a religious matter, objected to.
In other words, Kavanaugh summarized what Priests for Life believed about certain artificial contraceptives.
The pro-abortion lobby and its torpedoes in the Senate went to work. Kavanaugh, they argued, believes all contraceptives are abortifacients.
Harris tweeted an edited version of Kavanaugh’s answer that deleted “they said” to make it appear as if Kavanaugh was expressing his own opinion, not that of Priests for Life. Wrote Harris:
Kavanaugh chooses his words very carefully, and this is a dog whistle for going after birth control. He was nominated for the purpose of taking away a woman’s constitutionally protected right to make her own health care decisions. Make no mistake — this is about punishing women.
Caught in the lie, Harris provided the full video but stood by her point. “There’s no question that he uncritically used the term ‘abortion-inducing drugs,’ which is a dog whistle term used by extreme anti-choice groups to describe birth control,” she said.
The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, reported the deception and awarded Harris Four Pinocchios.
Blasey Ford and Four More Ps
But then came Christine Blasey Ford with her bogus tale of sex assault.
Harris immediately said Ford had to be believed — unlike Tara Reade, the former Biden staffer who in March accused the Democrat presidential contender of a sex assault three decades ago.
“I believe her,” Harris said of Ford. “Anybody who comes forward at this point to be prepared to testify in the United States Senate against someone who’s being nominated to one of the most powerful positions in the United States government, that takes an extraordinary amount of courage.”
And, Harris continued, “she has nothing to gain. What does she have to gain?”
Harris did not pose that same question of Reade, but in any event, Ford’s own witnesses, as the prosecutor who questioned her for the Judiciary Committee reported, “refuted” and “failed to corroborate” her shaky story.
Yet Harris and Kavanaugh’s opponents used the false charge as one excuse to oppose Kavanaugh.
Harris eventually confessed that she smeared Kavanaugh to protect so-called abortion rights.
Yet her trouble with the truth continued when she received a second Four Pinocchios from Kessler for a fib about tax refunds under President Trump’s tax cuts.
Harris tweeted that 2018 refunds were $170 lower than the previous year, a sign that Trump had enriched the dreaded “one percent.”
Not true, Kessler reported. A smaller tax refund says nothing about the size of one’s tax bill, and refunds were smaller because the Internal Revenue Service altered withholding tables; i.e., taxpayers saw more money in their paychecks and paid less to the government.
Either Harris simply doesn’t understand taxes, or she was lying to smear Trump the way she smeared Kavanaugh.
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
