(Don’t) Curb Your Enthusiasm

By Sodapeaw @Adobe Stock

Continuing the Biden Era Reckless Spending

The Washington Post reports that a group of national progressive leaders held a call Monday night to rally support for Vice President Harris, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

Those included in the call:

• Bernie Sanders (Vt.),
• Elizabeth Warren (Mass.)
• Edward J. Markey (Mass.),
• Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus; Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson;
• Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.
• Also labor leaders such as Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers.

Progressive Historic Support for Harris

The group, Progressives for Harris, wonders, “Can anyone remember the last time this many progressive champions representing such a wide breadth of the progressive movement were together on an organizing call like this? It shows how excited progressives are to support the Harris campaign.”

Is Bernie joining an effort to tout a historic level of excitement among so-called progressives for Ms. Harris? James Freeman in the WSJ thinks it calls into question a recent claim Bernie Sanders made in a Fox News interview:

From Bernie Sanders: 

“Let me just simply say that for better or for worse, Kamala Harris is not more progressive than I am.”

How to Measure 

Voting records are one way of measuring levels of extremism, suggests Mr. Freeman.

• GovTrack, an organization that tracks congressional voting records, confirmed that it had removed a 2019 web page that ranked Kamala Harris as that year’s “most liberal” U.S. senator sometime within the last two weeks.

• The (self-described) “government transparency website” scored Harris as the “most liberal compared to all senators” in 2019, outranking Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren at the time.

But the web page with the ranking, which was widely covered in news reports during the 2020 election, was recently deactivated, Mr. Freeman tells readers. The link now displays a “Page Not Found” message. The Internet Archive shows the page was deleted sometime between July 10 and July 23, with some on X claiming the page was still up on July 22.

Questionable Timing?

… no matter how you slice the data, and how nutty Mr. Sanders may appear, it’s not that easy to make a fact-based case that Ms. Harris is more sensible.

GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer admitted the page was removed. Tauberer claims the company adopted a policy “several years ago” to end its “single-year ratings of lawmakers to only do ratings based on Congressional sessions, which are two years.”

When asked why the pages weren’t removed when single-year report cards were abandoned years ago, Tauberer hedged, “I was focused on more impactful aspects of our work.”

Before GovTrack changed its ranking language from “most liberal” to “most politically left,” Kamala Harris was ranked the second most liberal in all the Senate behind Independent Bernie Sanders.

Voters May Never Know 

There is an asterisk here, argues Mr. Freeman, suggesting the debate may never be truly settled:

… Ms. Harris was vetted and then named as Joe Biden’s running mate during 2020, which may have slightly moderated her voting preferences that year, and therefore served as a sort of progressive performance enhancer for Mr. Sanders as he sped toward the bottom. This race may just be too close to call.

Perhaps some other news from Team Harris today is intended to reassure voters that her economic policies will be only as reckless as the inflationary spending binge of the Biden era.