VIEW Host Calls Harris “MODERATE”
Co-host of “The View,” Alyssa Farah Griffin, gave fellow co-host Sunny Hostin a reality check on Friday after she referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “moderate.”
The nonpartisan group GovTrack, which keeps tabs on members’ voting records, ranked Harris as the most liberal senator in the 116th Congress, barely ahead of the independent senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders. Following Hostin’s description of Harris as “moderate,” Griffin examined her platform and policy history for the 2020 presidential primaries.
“Republicans are trying to frame her as this deep leftist,” Hostin began. “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. Prosecutors are not 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.”
“Can I respond to that?” Griffin interjected. “I think the point is that in 2020, she ran in a moment where she ran to the left.”
Griffin cited Harris’ endorsement of using bail money to free Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Griffin went on to say that as Harris gets ready to enter the general election, she is shifting to the center.
“One example was this 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,” Griffin added, after receiving pushback from her fellow co-hosts.
When Harris was California’s attorney general, she sentenced about 2,000 people harshly for offenses involving marijuana. For this, she came under fire. She co-sponsored a bill to decriminalize marijuana usage while she was a senator.
The current vice president additionally signed a “Medicare for All” bill introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders, which sought to do away with commercial health insurance and establish a single-payer system in which the federal government serves as the exclusive supplier of health insurance. Later, in July 2019, she put out her own “Medicare for All” legislation, which would have allowed people to continue using their preferred private insurance company.
In addition, Harris backed the repeal of the Senate filibuster to expedite the passage of the Green New Deal legislation in 2019. The legislation was first proposed in the House by Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York in 2019. Additionally, the then-Democratic senator was in favor of a fracking prohibition, which she later withdrew. During her 2020 presidential campaign, she supported reparations for African Americans who had been enslaved.
