Which senator had the most liberal voting record in 2019? According to GovTrack.us in January 2020, it was then-Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). Today, that same webpage can no longer be found, nor can the page for Harris’s 2019 report card. The internet Wayback Machine first noticed the pages missing on Monday. Coinciding with this disappearance was only one relevant change: last weekend President Joe Biden announced via X that he would not seek reelection and endorsed Harris as his replacement.
Is the media scrubbing the web of Harris’s past liberal record?
According to GovTrack.us in July 2024, there was a perfectly innocent-sounding explanation for the sudden scrubbing of a five-year-old webpage. That page “was based on a single calendar year. Several years ago we discontinued creating new single-calendar-year ‘report cards’ because a single year of data is “not sufficient to create a reliable portrait of the activity of legislators.”
It is true that more years of data provide a fuller picture. However, having only served in the Senate for four years, Harris didn’t develop a large legislative record there. In 2017 (also archived), GovTrack.us ranked Harris as the 8th-most liberal senator by voting record. In 2018 (live), she ranked as the 4th-most liberal. Harris was the most liberal in 2019, and in 2020 (also live) she ranked as the 2nd-most liberal senator. In 2021, she became vice president.
But arguing that “a reliable portrait” of a legislator’s activity required information from multiple years is not an explanation for deleting pages from certain years and not others. Indeed, deleting any record of voting scores seems beneath an organization described as a non-partisan “government transparency site.”
Their poor excuse for deleting the 2019 report card (and a 2019 page ranking all senators ideologically), combined with the suggestive timing of the move, only stoked suspicions that GovTrack.us deleted the pages to obscure Harris’s voting record, which was the most liberal of the year. What made GovTrack’s coverup even more embarrassing is that their patchwork deletions did not even effectively obscure Harris’s consistently liberal voting record.
When CBS news anchor Norah O’Donnell asked Harris about the “most-liberal” ranking in an interview for “60 Minutes,” Harris first deflected, then characteristically laughed it off. “You supported the Green New Deal, you supported Medicare for all, you’ve supported legalizing marijuana. Joe Biden doesn’t support those things,” O’Donnell pressed.
Harris did not deny that statement. Instead, she responded, “What I will do — and I promise you this, and this is what Joe wants me to do, this was part of our deal — I will always share with him my lived experience as it relates to any issue that we confront. And I promised Joe that I will give him that perspective and always be honest with him.”
Two things seem to be true at the same time. On one hand, Kamala Harris is on the far-left flank of the American political spectrum, or at least she wants the support of that constituency. On the other hand, Harris also has national political ambitions and enough political instincts to recognize that being “the most liberal senator” doesn’t play well in most places outside of California.
The best explanation to be offered so far for GovTrack.us deleting Harris’s record from their site is that they, too, recognize the political liability of being “the most liberal senator,” and they removed the page as an intangible contribution to Harris’s campaign for president. If they wish to dispute this, let them offer a better explanation to convince us. The American people know when we are being gaslighted.
Border Czar?
GovTrack.us is not the only organization to be exposed for polishing up Harris’s record by, well, denying what they had previously said about it. “In the past few days,” Axios claimed Wednesday, “the Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the ‘border czar’ title — which she never actually had.”
Again, the urge to exonerate Harris of any responsibility for the border serves the short-term, political goal of separating her from the unpopular border policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
Yet this critique would surprise Axios writers from five years ago, when they unironically called Harris the “border czar.” The very same writer who is now denouncing Republicans’ use of the label “border czar,” Stef Kight, wrote an article on March 24, 2021 titled, “Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis.” As with all American applications of the word “czar,” the “border czar” refers colloquially to the person in charge of an issue, not to that person’s technical title.
Even worse, this shifts the focus of history revisionism from Harris’s Senate career to her record as vice president. In other words, it memory-holes Harris’s actions not from a role she held five years ago, but from a role she holds right now. In other words, to identify Axios’s infinitesimal distinction, their readers would not only have to rewrite their memory of their recent past but also override their current political knowledge about the present.
Axios knows better, and their readers do too. But they went ahead and published this ridiculous argument for cheap political points, hoping no one would notice that they had drawn a distinction without a difference. After getting called out in a community note on X, Axios doubled-down on their recent resolve to split hairs. At the bottom of their most recent article, an editor’s note now declares that “Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021.”
“There’s some kind of oligarchy there that’s running the country,” declared Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) on “Washington Watch” Thursday. “You’ve got the massive cover up and cleaning up of the image of Kamala Harris, who has bungled everything that she’s been put in charge of, like the border.”
“She was the border czar,” Biggs added. “Everybody calls her that. And if you don’t like border czar, she was appointed to lead the border effort. She was the manager. She was the director, whatever you want to call it. The bottom line is still the same. She failed, and Joe Biden, stuck with her.”
Rioter Bailouts
Yet another attempt to rehabilitate Kamala Harris’s political image came Thursday, when CBS News claimed, “Trump falsely accuses Harris of donating to Minnesota Freedom Fund, bailing out ‘dangerous criminals.’”
The Minnesota Freedom Fund was a Democrat-organized fundraiser to bail out violent activists who were arrested for attacking police, torching businesses, and terrorizing neighborhoods during the height of the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020. Again, it’s obvious why Harris and her supporters would want to distance themselves from such a politically unpopular policy.
CBS News got tagged by a community note informing their readers that Harris publicly promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund in a June 1, 2020 tweet that is still live, “If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
CBS has since updated its headline to read, “Despite Trump claim and 2020 tweet showing support, Harris never donated to Minnesota Freedom Fund.” In other words, to salvage the “news” story, CBS twisted it into a story about something a politician didn’t do four years ago. Do these people ever listen to themselves?
Even if they hadn’t descended into absurdity, it’s hard to see that Harris appears in a better light after CBS’s amended story. Perhaps she didn’t personally donate to the rioter bail fund. But she promoted it and encouraged others to donate to it. If the point was to distance the presumptive Democratic nominee from a radical, unpopular stance she took four years ago, the mission was most definitely not accomplished.
In late 2023, The New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy profile of Harris that described how she “is still struggling to make the case for herself — and feels she shouldn’t have to.” The bottom line is that many Americans have never been very enamored with the radical, leftward-pressing fringe of the Democratic Party that Harris so often represents. Until recently, it was okay for the media to say so. But, with Biden bowing out of the race, and no other Democrat stepping forward to challenge Trump, refurbishing Harris’s rusty image has become the prime objective.
In unburdening Harris from what has been, it seems the media is not above rewriting the past.
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.
