Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas noted on ABC News on Sunday that Vice President Kamala Harris has yet to distance herself from her former far-left views.
“I'm not going to lie, but I'm going to be the first to say that Harris is going to be the first to run for president in 2020,” Cotton said in a statement.
“This is not a radical caucus. She's not taking a position on the far left of the party, as I said about Bernie Sanders. She's clearly trying to move toward the center,” Kahl said.
“I certainly heard what you said to Senator Sanders, and I thought it was clear to me that he was very disappointed that she is making these efforts not to change positions but to hide positions, John. The American people are entirely justified in concluding, based on what she campaigned on in the last presidential election and what this administration has done over the last four years, that Kamala Harris is a dangerous San Francisco liberal,” Cotton said.
Cotton said Harris distanced herself from the Biden administration at last week's Democratic National Convention and also criticized her 2020 campaign pledges, including “decriminalizing illegal immigration.” (RELATED: 'I don't want her to talk to me': Democratic pollster wants Harris to continue avoiding the press)
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“If you watched the Democratic convention last week, you would have thought that the Democrats were not in power, that they were not in power, that they were campaigning against an incumbent Republican. But in reality, she's been complicit in the failure of the Biden-Harris administration for four years, running for president on her own terms and actually promising things like decriminalizing illegal immigration.”
Kahl then argued that “Harris has clearly changed her position and is saying she has changed,” but Cotton countered that only aides had come forward to distance Harris from his campaign policies.
“No, she never said that. John, she never said that. You have repeatedly pointed out to Senator Sanders what her campaign has said, an anonymous aide telling a background reporter, 'She doesn't believe that anymore.' I get it. Maybe she's changed her position on health insurance or gun confiscation. If she has changed her position, she owes it to the American people to say publicly, in her own words, when she changed and why she changed,” Cotton said.
“That's one of the reasons why she needs to speak to the American people and talk about these questions, because the only basis on which the American people will judge her as president is what she's done in this administration for four years and what she said with her own mouth during the last campaign,” Cotton continued. “Remember, this isn't some kind of college essay, John. This is something she said when she was campaigning for president as a 54-year-old woman. If she's had such a dramatic change of heart in the last five years, she owes the American people an answer.”
Republicans have repeatedly accused Harris of constantly shifting policy stances, despite previously campaigning on left-leaning platforms such as a ban on fracking, a federal gun buyback mandate and an end to private health insurance. Her campaign and supporters have defended her since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, even though she has not personally addressed those issues in press conferences.
In late July, Harris' national campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu was pressed on CNN about Harris' unconfirmed stance on defunding the police, arguing that “Her actions show that she wants to defund the police, but she also wants to do other things, because those things together create safety on American streets.”
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