‘A New Way Forward’? Harris Campaign (Finally) Announces 2024 Policies

One day ahead of her debate with former President Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris has unveiled a policy agenda that could compel Christian businesses to participate in abortion and LGBT events that violate biblical morality, sign a national abortion expansion bill, pack the Supreme Court, give amnesty to the entire illegal immigrant population of the United States, strip law-abiding U.S. citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process, double-down on inflationary economic policies, continue criminal lawfare against Trump, and promote universal daycare.

Until Monday morning, the “issues” section of Kamala Harris’s campaign website did not exist 49 days after the Democratic Party coronated Harris without a primary. Harris has dubbed her policy plan “A New Way Forward” — the same name President George W. Bush gave to his 2007 surge in Iraq, intended to end terrorism against U.S. soldiers and transform Muslim Iraq into a pluralistic Western democracy.

Equity for the LGBTQ movement, bankruptcy for Christian businesses: The cornerstone of Harris’s LGBTQ policy, which she brands as promoting “civil rights,” would prevent Christian business people from living out their faith in the private sector and economically impoverish believers. After noting she began unlawfully officiating same-sex marriage in 2004 as California attorney general and “refused to defend” a marriage protection amendment democratically passed by California voters, Harris promises “to pass the Equality Act to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.” The so-called Equality Act would add sexual preference and, in some versions, gender identity, to landmark civil rights legislation designed to protect racial minorities and women from discrimination. By raising homosexuality and transgenderism to the same legal status as race and religion, the Equality Act could force Christian doctors to perform gender-reassignment surgeries and require Christian business owners to take part in services that violate their religious beliefs — or go out of business. State and local statutes modeled after this bill have resulted in such lawfare prosecutions as the never-ending legal disputes of Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips.

Throughout the issues section, Harris contrasts her policy positions, not with the radically truncated 2024 Republican Party platform which Trump campaign operatives foisted on rank-and-file delegates at the Republican National Committee on July 8, but with “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda.” The Trump campaign publicly opposed the project, which the Heritage Foundation subsequently wound down. Trump replaced GOP’s historic commitment to a Human Life Amendment, and Republican vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) confirmed that Trump will veto any national pro-life protections that cross his desk during the next four years. 

The “Project 2025 agenda will eliminate federal rules that protect LGBTQI+ Americans from discrimination,” says the website, referring to laws like the SAFE Act that prevent the predatory transgender industry from targeting minors for puberty blocks, cross-sex hormone injections, and life-altering surgeries.

A national abortion expansion act: The website continues the Harris campaign’s rebranding of abortion as “reproductive freedom,” vowing that, as president, “she will never allow a national abortion ban to become law. And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom nationwide, she will sign it.” The Biden-Harris administration has endorsed the so-called “Women’s Health Protection” Act (WHPA), which would strike down more than 1,300 state pro-life protections including laws protecting children from late-term abortions (including some after the point of viability), repealing parental consent and notification laws, and repealing conscience protections for pro-life healers.

“If elected, Trump will ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control, force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, and jeopardize access to IVF,” it claims, although no law nor proposal would curtail IVF, and Trump controversially promised to force insurance plans, or U.S. taxpayers, to fund the procedure, which has resulted in unknown millions of abortions and abandoned embryos.

“He even called for punishment for women who have an abortion,” says the website — based on an off-the-cuff remark Trump reversed the day after he made it in a March 2016 interview with Chris Matthews, who resigned from MSNBC four years ago. Trump explained during the 2016 campaign, “I didn’t mean punishment for women like prison” but rather that women who have abortions “punish themselves.” Numerous surveys show women suffer psychologically, and often physically, after enduring an abortion.

The section apparently praises her own administration’s foray into compelling taxpayers to fund abortion. “Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe we have a sacred obligation to care for our nation’s service members, veterans, [and] their families,” says the website. Last July, the Biden-Harris administration Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, called paying for abortions a “foundational, sacred obligation of military leaders.”

Amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants: Harris promises to “secure our borders and fix our broken immigration system,” which her website ranks below promoting gun control. She “will bring back the bipartisan border security bill,” which she called “the strongest reform in decades.” Harris promises to reward tens of millions of illegal immigrants who broke U.S. immigration law with U.S. citizenship, calling her amnesty plan “an earned pathway to citizenship.” The Biden-Harris administration has presided over record-breaking levels of illegal immigration every year in office, not counting new legal pathways they have been established for immigrants from nations such as Haiti. Previous historic levels of illegal immigration came when candidates promised, or delivered, amnesty. This “is her attempt to make permanent what we have seen, which is lawlessness,” Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) told Fox Business on Tuesday morning.

The Democratic candidate blames the broken border on Donald Trump. “Trump fail to tackle violence in our communities or fix our broken immigration system — he will make us less safe,” the Harris website states. “He’ll advance his cruel immigration agenda which includes separating children from their parents,” a policy carried out by the Obama-Biden administration and continued by the Biden-Harris administration.

The fentanyl crisis: “This past year, the number of overdose deaths in the United States declined for the first time in five years,” the website boasts. But the Biden-Harris administration presided over record-breaking numbers of overdoses, largely driven by fentanyl crossing the Southern border from Mexico. The administration’s drug policy aimed to decriminalize marijuana and promoted so-called “harm reduction” policies, which distributed crack pipes to addicts as part of taxpayer-funded “smoking kits.”

Supreme Court packing: Harris supports a plan that would overhaul the U.S. Supreme Court by “requiring [j]ustices to comply with ethics rules that other federal judges are bound by and imposing term limits.” The recent term limits plan embraced by prominent Democrats would sideline the most conservative justices and transform the court from a lifetime appointment to one continually threatened by, and responding to, political pressure.

More gun control: Harris promises to “ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” The Biden-Harris administration has applied the term “assault rifle” to America’s most popular rifle, the AR-15; California law also bans magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The vice president’s pledge to “require universal background checks” would require the government to pry into all sales, and potentially gifts, of guns between private individuals. She also vows to pass “red flag laws,” which unconstitutionally remove guns from the home of law-abiding citizens without due process, if their neighbors, criminals, or vengeful ex-boyfriends report them as mentally troubled. The laws would render those reported defenseless in their own homes.

The website notes, “As head of the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, she spearheaded policies to expand background checks and close the gun show loophole. Under her and President Biden’s leadership, violent crime is at a 50-year low, with the largest single-year drop in murders ever.” In fact, the U.S. homicide rate rose again in 2021 to 8.2 out of 100,00 according to the CDC. The homicide rate in 2022, the most recent year for which data are available, stood at 7.7, significantly higher than the 5.9 rate in 2018.

The website complains that Donald Trump “wants to arm teachers in our classrooms” in response to an ongoing string of school shootings.

Prosecuting Donald Trump? The Harris campaign website promises the Democratic presidential candidate will “fight to ensure that no former president has immunity for crimes committed while in the White House.” That comes in response to a Supreme Court ruling which granted presidents extremely limited immunity for actions carried out in his official capacity as president of the United States — not for private actions. Legal experts warn the threat of prosecution would criminalize political differences and turn the United States into a banana republic.

Nonetheless, the website claims President Trump will “bring the Department of Justice and the FBI under his direct control so he can give himself unchecked legal power and go after his opponents.” Similarly, at the first night of the Democratic National Convention, Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow (D) warned, “Under Project 2025, Donald Trump would be able to weaponize the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents.”

“Donald Trump is a convicted criminal who only cares about himself,” the website says.

Recycling lies about Donald Trump: The issues section also misleads about the two candidates’ biographies and policy positions. “Vice President Harris grew up in a middle[-]class home as the daughter of a working mom,” says the website. But Kamala Harris grew up in the famously left-wing city of Berkeley where her father, Donald J. Harris, was “a renowned Marxist professor” and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer researcher. The vice president also grew up in Montreal.

Donald Trump has “said he would let Russia ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to our NATO allies. And he calls soldiers who gave their lives in defense of American democracy ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’” it says. Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton — a neoconservative who has persistently criticized Trump’s non-interventionist foreign policy — called reports that President Trump disparaged fallen U.S. soldiers “simply false.” The comments from Trump, a master of overstatement, about NATO came in response to a question from a foreign leader about whether the U.S. would defend a nation that steadfastly refused to meet its obligations under the treaty to spend a requisite amount of funds on its own national defense. For decades, Trump has criticized one-sided deals in which foreign nations freeload off U.S. taxpayers.

Demonizing Trump: “Someone as dangerous as Donald Trump should never again be allowed to serve as commander-in-chief,” says the website. “Top American military generals and national security officials — including those who worked for Trump — have warned that he is ‘dangerous’ and ‘unfit’ to lead, and now he is surrounded by ultra-loyalists who enable his worst impulses.” These remarks come despite a near-fatal assassination attempt against the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, which missed by a fraction of an inch, something the president has credited to divine intervention.

Civil rights: Kamala Harris commits herself to securing “$2 billion in funding for Offices of Civil Rights across the federal government,” which will supersize federal lawsuits against private employers who refuse to implement Woke policies on the basis of race, sexual preference, and gender identity.

Inflationary economics and price controls: Kamala Harris says that “guilding up the middle class will be a defining goal of her presidency.” Yet on her watch, inflation reached a 40-year high of 9.1% in 2022, lifting costs and squeezing families across the nation. Overall groceries have risen nearly 20% over four years. The median price of a new house has more than doubled since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office. Americans must spend an extra $13,000 a year under the Biden-Harris administration to have the same standard of living they enjoyed under the Trump administration, according to one expert analysis. The spike in prices, which critics dub Bidenflation, has reduced Americans’ savings levels by 3.2%. The website notes “[h]er tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act,” which economists say carried a real price tag of $1.2 trillion and sparked inflation, in addition to piling more money onto the $35 trillion national debt. As the site also points out, “Vice President Harris cast the deciding vote on the” $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan.”

Harris has promised to implement national price controls on food and rent. She will implement the “first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries,” says the website, although grocers have an extremely thin profit margin. She also promises national rent control. “Vice President Harris knows rent is too high and will sign legislation to outlaw new forms of price fixing by corporate landlords.” She claims she’ll build three million more rental units and “Vice President Harris will provide first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 to help with their down payments, with more generous support for first-generation homeowners.” Economists agree the policy will simply raise the price of houses by $25,000 while price controls, which failed in the 1970s, will restrict supply.

“Trump would raise rents and add $1,200 a year to the typical American mortgage,” she claims without proof.

Harris’s campaign promises she “will take on Big Pharma,” although the Biden-Harris administration passed vaccination mandates that the White House claimed applied to two-thirds of all U.S. workers, including attempting to force the approximately 25 million people employed at a workplace with at least 100 employees to take the COVID-19 shot or be fired. They also dismissed 8,400 members of the U.S. armed forces who refused to take the shot. Researchers have subsequently linked the injection to an increased risk of myocarditis and excess deaths.

“Vice President Harris will protect Social Security and Medicare against relentless attacks from Donald Trump,” who has steadfastly opposed any reform of the entitlement programs. Social Security is scheduled to become insolvent in 2033. Medicare faces the same fate in 2036.

Environmental globalism: Meeting the “global challenge” of climate change “will require global cooperation,” and she is committed to continuing “the United States’ international climate leadership,” says the Harris campaign website. The U.S. will lead global compacts on fossil fuels. “[S]he will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice.” Harris, who promised she would “absolutely” end fracking in the 2020 Democratic primaries, claims this will result in “lowering household energy costs” and “record energy production.”

Kamala warns Trump will increase gasoline prices: “Trump asked Big Oil executives to give his campaign money so he could roll back regulations and cut taxes for Big Oil to boost their profits, and Trump’s plans would push gas prices up,” she asserts. The cost of a gallon of gasoline has increased from $2.33 when President Donald Trump left office in January 2021 to a record high of $5.02 in June 2022 under Biden-Harris, despite releasing nearly half of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The cost now sits at $3.62 a gallon.

“Trump’s economic plans would also trigger a recession by mid-2025,” she said, although some economists agree America is already in a recession. The U.S. experienced the textbook definition of a recession — two consecutive quarters of economic contraction — under the Biden-Harris administration in the first two quarters of 2022. But the administration has denied the recession took place, since the panel tasked with declaring a recession, the Business Cycle Dating Committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research, did not formally make such a pronouncement.

PRO Act/public sector unions: “She’ll sign landmark pro-union legislation, including the PRO Act to support workers who choose to organize and bargain and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act to make the freedom for public service workers to form unions the law of the land.” The PRO Act would force millions of workers to pay union dues against their will, cripple freelance work, erase free speech and privacy rights, skew elections in favor of unionization, and radically increase the federal government’s intervention into everyday workplace disputes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed the 1935 Wagner Act codifying Americans’ right to union representation, believed public-sector unions should not exist and called militant labor tactics “unthinkable and intolerable.”

“She’ll fight to raise the minimum wage, end sub-minimum wages for tipped workers,” radically altering the landscape of tipped work.

Harris’s agenda will be paid for by “making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.” The top 1% of U.S. income earners pay 46% of all federal income taxes, while the bottom 50% pays 2% of taxes.

Manufacturing jobs: “Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 1.6 million manufacturing and construction jobs have been created,” Harris claims. But most of these are jobs destroyed during COVID-19 lockdowns coming back online. The Biden-Harris administration has in fact added 147,000 manufacturing jobs above the level in January 2020.

Universal preschool: “Vice President Harris will fight to ensure parents can afford high-quality child care and preschool for their children. … [E]nsuring hardworking families can afford high-quality child care, all while ensuring that care workers are paid a living wage and treated with the dignity and respect they deserve,” the website states. However, surveys consistently show most mothers would like to remain home with their own children, at least part of the time, during their child’s formative years.

Transferring student loan debt and medical costs to taxpayers: Harris will “continue working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt,” she promises. “As Vice President, she also announced that medical debt will be removed from credit reports, and helped cancel $7 billion of medical debt for 3 million Americans. As President, she’ll work with states to cancel medical debt for even more Americans.”

Promising not to raise taxes on most Americans, but … : Harris is also “committed to ensuring no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes.” But the Biden-Harris administration has already raised fees on the middle class and working poor by:

• expanding the number of items that must be registered under the National Firearms Act, with a $200 fee for each item;
• reinstating the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and $695-per-person penalty, which President Trump eliminated;
• imposing a carbon and/or methane tax. One proposal would charge companies $1,800 per ton of methane they handle (not emit), with the cost rising 2% above inflation each year;
• increasing corporate taxes, which pass on approximately one-third of increased costs to consumers by raising prices (and another third by reducing payroll costs/hours); and
• hiking cigarette taxes, which fall disproportionately on the working class.

She also praises tax-and-spend policies, claiming that “when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad-based economic growth and creates jobs, which makes our economy stronger.” But Paul Mueller of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) described Harris’s economic interventionism as “extensive government involvement, huge amounts of spending,” and “a giveaway campaign.”

She also plans more Woke equity, pledging to “increase access to capital for small businesses and bring venture capital to parts of middle America that have for too long been overlooked … tripling the Small Business Administration’s lending to [b]lack-owned businesses, and more than doubling small-dollar lending to Latino and women-owned businesses.”

Harris also supports increasing taxpayer-funded subsidies for the Obamacare health care exchanges.

Foreign policy: Harris says she “will always stand up for American interests in the face of China’s threats.”

“Vice President Harris will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself,” the website avers. “She and President Biden are working to end the war in Gaza, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”

The vice president’s website also notes her strong support for Ukraine. Under the Biden-Harris administration, U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $175 billion aiding Ukraine, despite its stalled war with Russia, the Zelensky government’s well-documented corruption, and persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The website boasts that Kamala Harris has been “advising on tough decisions in the Oval Office and the Situation Room.” Harris bragged about being “the last person in the room” before Joe Biden decided on the details of the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which cost the lives of 13 U.S. service members and left an unknown number of Americans stranded behind the Taliban’s lines.