Tim Walz Is the Key to This Election
Editor's Note
Since taking up the mantle of the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris has carefully avoided scrutiny of her positions and her plans, shunning virtually all media engagement and waiting to publish any policy positions until the day before her debate with Donald Trump. Frank Cannon argues, then, that the selection of running mate Tim Walz provides the only clear indication of what policy a Harris administration might pursue if the Democrats win the election. As Walz’s record shows, the ticket would be radical on every issue from abortion to free speech to the Second Amendment and beyond. As Election Day draws ever nearer, Republicans should take note, and take the fight to Walz — and, through him, to Harris, who will have to stand or fall on the record and agenda of her running mate.
Since successfully overthrowing the current president of the United States and taking over as the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris has maintained strategic ambiguity about what, if anything, she actually believes. She recognizes that many elements of her 2020 platform — banning plastic straws, requiring taxpayer funding of sex-changes for illegal immigrants — are comically out of step with the average voter. So she’s decided instead to try to run out the clock, hoping she can eke out a win by being purposefully opaque and speaking exclusively in platitudes between now and election day.
But with her vice presidential pick, Harris offers voters some insight into her true beliefs. Her endorsement of Tim Walz’s record (which Harris reportedly “love[s]”), elevating him to the second spot on the Democratic ticket, is by far the clearest — perhaps the only clear — indication of her would-be governing agenda since she seized the nomination. And it paints a far darker picture than her current rhetoric would suggest.
Take, for example, Harris’s argument on abortion during last week’s debate. Harris has been an extremist on the issue for almost her entire political career, steadfastly supporting abortion for any reason throughout all nine months of pregnancy. On Tuesday, however, she was more circumspect. She claimed that all she wanted was to restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. She scoffed at the idea that she supported abortion in the third trimester. Harris, with eager help from the supposedly neutral moderators, memory-holed former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s admission that babies born during an attempted abortion are routinely denied medical treatment. Such things, they informed us, simply do not happen.
One only has to look at Walz’s record to see that this is outright gaslighting. Walz has enacted abortion policy in Minnesota, and it certainly isn’t the Roe standard. Instead, he declared a fundamental right to abortions, full stop, for any reason, even in the second and third trimesters. Under Walz’s leadership, Minnesota established one of the most extreme abortion regimes in the country, even removing the requirements that late-term abortions be done in hospitals or that parents be notified if their minor daughter gets an abortion.
As for the claim that babies born during an attempted abortion always receive medical care, data from Walz’s own state government shows that to be untrue. According to the Minnesota Department of Health, at least eight babies since Walz became governor — it’s hard to tell the exact number, because Walz has since repealed the reporting requirement — were born alive during abortion attempts. Not one of them received medical treatment to save their lives. The vast majority did not even receive “comfort care” to ease their pain (babies can feel the pain of an abortion at least by the fifteenth week of pregnancy). Walz, in fact, repealed an existing statutory requirement that doctors provide any care for babies in this type of situation.
The debate obfuscations didn’t end there. Harris looked bemusedly perplexed when Trump reminded voters of her pledge last election cycle to support taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for detained illegal immigrants. Why the befuddlement? Her hand-picked second-in-command supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners in his own state. He supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for almost anybody, in fact. Under his watch, Minnesota Health Care Programs provides funding for sex-change surgeries for children. They’ll even fund transgender-identifying individuals’ “voice therapy,” hair removal, and inflatable penile prostheses.
The list goes on. Harris pretends to love the Second Amendment; Walz gets straight Fs from the NRA. Harris gestures towards an all-of-the-above approach to domestic energy production; Walz signed a bill to require car companies to shift over to electric vehicles, and is trying to force utility companies in Minnesota to eliminate all use of coal, oil, or natural gas by 2040. Harris pretends to love the police; Walz let Minneapolis burn.
Harris can try to pivot away from her extremism because the media will help her get away with it, and because the last four years of her public life have been mostly characterized by her failure to do much of anything at all, on the border and elsewhere. But when she picked Tim Walz, Kamala Harris was telling every single voter exactly what she wants to do, and what she believes in. Voters should look to Walz, not Harris’s poll-tested soundbites, to figure out what they’d be in for if she takes the White House this November.