DV Journal

Vice President Kamala Harris says she will not ban fracking, she will not confiscate your guns and she will not take away your gas-powered car.

“Contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive,” the Democratic presidential nominee recently told a Michigan crowd.

However, like her previous promises, Harris has a record that contradicts her current stance. In fact, she co-sponsored the  Zero-Emission Vehicles Act of 2019, which would have ended the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2040. Except the version Harris backed actually moved that date up to 2035.

“Ending sales of new gas-powered cars is part of Kamala Harris’ climate change plan,” as the Sacramento Bee headline said.

“We’re facing a climate crisis that must be met with bold action,” Harris said.

Harris’s defenders argue that her aggressive proposals to end gas-powered cars were part of her 2020 presidential strategy of running in the progressive lane. Now that she’s the vice president, they claim her true colors are on display.

As vice president, Harris has supported “net zero emissions” by 2050 and ending the use of gas-powered cars to achieve that goal.

Harris also included a social justice element in her current arguments, claiming that low-income and minority communities are disproportionately affected by pollution from gas-powered vehicles.

“The pollution from vehicles powered by fossil fuels has long harmed the health of communities around our country — communities overlooked and underserved,” she said in 2021.

“But there is a solution to this problem. … Electric cars, trucks, and buses.”

So, what’s behind Harris’s shift on gas-powered vehicles? Americans don’t want EVs.

“It’s become very clear in the last year or two that there’s a lot of consumers that just don’t really want electric vehicles,” said Kenny Stein, vice president of policy at the Institute for Energy Research.

About 14 million new cars were sold in the United States in 2022, and 1.6 million were EVs. Many of those sales came with generous federal and state tax subsidies. As more Americans become familiar with electric vehicle technology, their interest in owning an EV is fading.

The 2024 Mobility Consumer Index found that only 34 percent of U.S. consumers plan to buy an electric vehicle — fully battery or hybrid —for their next car. That’s down from 48 percent a year earlier.

Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration has continued to pursue policies to push Americans into EVs. The Environmental Protection Agency wants tailpipe emissions standards that will make gas-powered cars mpossible to manufacture.

The EPA’s emissions standards mean that gas-powered cars can make up no more than 30 percent of auto sales by 2032.

“Make no mistake: This is a coerced phase-out of gas-powered cars,” the Wall Street Journal wrote.

Meanwhile, taxpayers who don’t drive EVs pay taxes to subsidize their sales.

According to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, direct state and federal subsidies for EVs average $8,984 per vehicle over 10 years.

To achieve the EPA and Harris’s goals, billions more taxpayer subsidies will be required. And most environmentalists concede that, regardless of Harris’s protestations that if you like your car, you can keep your car, regulations that keep gas-powered vehicles off the market will be needed, too.

The costs are already rising. The Inflation Reduction Act was primarily a green subsidy program. The Tax Foundation estimates that, over the next decade, its energy tax credits are likely to cost more than $1 trillion.

“The IRA’s credits for electric vehicles and charging infrastructure in particular are proving to be much more costly than anticipated, costing about $180 billion over the next decade,” it reports.

In September, House Energy and Commerce Committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., called out the Biden-Harris “radical rush-to-green energy agenda.”

“The EPA’s latest tailpipe emissions rule is not really about reducing air pollution — it’s about forcing Americans to drive electric vehicles.”

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Before President Joe Biden dropped out and made her the party’s presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris opposed fracking and supported the Green New Deal. Now her campaign claims she will allow fracking to continue if she becomes president.

They also say she no longer supports a national socialized medicine plan (“Medicare For All”), and she’s flipped on whether illegal immigration should be illegal (she now says yes.)

During a press availability on Tuesday, DVJournal asked Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick if Pennsylvania’s swing state voters should trust Harris on important issues like fracking now that she’s changed her mind and now claims to favor it.

“I don’t think so,” said McCormick.

The Republican candidate referenced one of his own campaign ads about Harris’s record, which has garnered more than 4 million views.

“The ad has Sen. Casey saying ‘she’s ready to be president. You’re going to love her when you get to know her.’ And it had a minute of her in her own words…She says, ‘I want to ban fracking. And I want to want to transition energy workers. I want to legalize illegal immigration. I want to be sure illegal immigrants get federal benefits.’ She said, ‘I want to have mandatory buybacks of guns. I want to eliminate private healthcare insurance.’ All in her own words. You can see the ad. And she said she wanted the government to get involved in reducing meat consumption. Red meat.”

“So listen, the Pennsylvania I grew up in and know well, that agenda isn’t resonating,” added McCormick.

“And on the fracking, she has said time and time again she embraced the green agenda, which meant huge, heavy subsidization of solar and wind at the expense of fossil fuels and the EPA mandate that happened when she was vice president, that 80 percent of all light vehicles will be electric vehicles by 2032. Even Elon Musk doesn’t support that.”

McCormick noted his Democratic opponent, incumbent Sen. Bob Casey Jr., voted with the Biden-Harris administration 98 percent of the time.

“So Pennsylvania has 600,000 people that are in the energy industry or have jobs that are derived from there. No, I don’t think they should trust that she or Sen. Casey are going to be strong advocates of unlocking our potential natural gas reserves, in particular in Pennsylvania.

“And the reason I think that’s such a big issue is it’s critical to our national security, it’s critical to Pennsylvania’s economic wellbeing,” McCormick said. “And it’s great for the environment. I’m an environmentalist. I believe in climate change. The way to reduce carbon emissions is to export our natural gas, where replaces coal-fired plants in India and China. None of those things are going to happen under Harris-Casey. The reason you should know that is they’ve proven it.”

Another reporter asked Harris’s sudden support for a policy promoted by her opponent, Donald Trump: eliminating the tax on tip income. McCormick said he favors it but hasn’t studied it closely. And, he added, Harris’s willingness to seize on a Trump policy she had never mentioned before is yet another sign she’s simply saying whatever it takes to get elected.

“I think it was interesting that Kamala Harris embraced that,” said McCormick. “If you’re going to embrace something, you should say, ‘It’s a good idea that President Trump had.’ That you would simply just grab that idea and then not acknowledge where it came from when she was part of an administration that was expressly saying they wanted to enforce through 80,000 new IRS agents the fact that people in the service industry should be taxed on tips.

“That turnaround is exactly like the fracking,” McCormick added. “You don’t get to say, ‘I’m for a new thing’ without explaining how your position’s changed, why it’s changed and why the voters should trust you. I don’t think the voters should trust her on banning fracking, and I don’t think they should trust her on that.”

Asked about President Joe Biden’s ideas to impose term limits and congressional oversight on the U.S. Supreme Court, McCormick said, “I’m by and large opposed to those proposals.  The reason is we have a situation here where I think expressly President Biden and Vice President Harris were embracing an agenda that would pack the Supreme Court.”

And that’s because they “don’t like [its] composition,” he said.

A former CEO of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, he also pushed back on attack ads Casey is running saying McCormick invested in a Chinese company that manufactured fentanyl. It turned out that Casey also had shares in that company through a mutual fund.

“Sen. Casey lied about it,” McCormick said. “Most Americans who own 401(k)s own some exposure to global stocks. And those global stocks are represented in countries around the world, usually China because China is such a big part of the economy. That’s essentially what Bridgewater did. It had an index that included global stocks. So, Bob Casey and Bridgewater — not Dave McCormick — Bridgewater owned part of a pharmaceutical company that sold to China a legal painkiller, which is fentanyl.

“It was an accusation which was an absolute lie. It’s not illegal fentanyl. And then Bob Casey, the ultimate liar and hypocrite, we discovered owns the same thing in his personal portfolio.”

“This guy’s lying, and he’s a hypocrite because he doesn’t have a record to run on,” said McCormick.

The Casey campaign did not respond to a request for comment.