In a very funny moment, in a somewhat frustrating way, on the Friday, July 26, broadcast of “The View,” co-hosts Alyssa Farah Griffin and Sunny Hostin got into a spat with each other over the political inclinations of Vice President Kamala Harris, namely with whether she is a “moderate” Democrat or someone much more to the left.
As background, VP Harris was, as a United States senator from California, anything but moderate. In fact, she was ranked by GovTrack, a non-partisan organization that tracks the voting records of lawmakers, the most liberal senator in the Democratic caucus during the 116th Congress. Only Bernie Sanders, an independent, was ranked more to the left.
Hostin, in any case, began by trying to frame VP Harris as a moderate and tough on crime prosecutor, saying, “Republicans are trying to frame her as this deep leftist. She’s a former prosecutor. She’s not only a former prosecutor, she was the AG of the largest Department of Justice in the country other than the real Department of Justice.”
Hostin then claimed that it is impossible for a prosecutor like Kamala to be a leftist because they throw people in jail for a living, and thus that she is a moderate. In her words: “Prosecutors are not really leftists, they put people in jail for a living, okay? They’re pretty moderate. I know the vice president personally—she is not—she’s moderate.”
That was too much for Griffin, who interjected and noted that Kamala ran as a leftist candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary, the race in which she was demolished by Tulsi Gabbard and dropped out early on, only to then become Joe’s VP. She said, “Can I respond to that? I think the point is that in 2020, she ran in a moment where she ran to the left.”
Continuing, Griffin added, despite receiving blowback from her fellow co-hosts for doing so, “One example was this is the moment of George Floyd, the country’s torn apart, and she put out a statement saying she wanted to bail out people who were protesting in the streets. So people took that a certain way, they felt like she was running to resonate in that primary unlike someone like Biden would.”
Watch the wild spat here:
VP Harris, as a senator, co-signed Sen. Sanders’s “Medicare for All” legislation, which would have abolished private health insurance and created a single-payer system where the federal government is the sole provider of health insurance coverage. She also co-sponsored the Senate’s introduction of the Green New Deal, AOC’s bill. Then, she supported eliminating the Senate filibuster to pass it in 2019. She also supported, though later walked back, a ban on fracking.
Further, in the 2020 race and 2019 run-up to it, she supported slavery reparations. In an interview with NPR, for example, she said, “But listen; when – unless there’s intervention done, it will appear to be, perhaps, generational. But it’s generational only because the environment has not experienced a significant enough change to reverse the symptoms. You need to put resources and direct resources – extra resources – into those communities that have experienced that trauma.”
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