Kamala Harris will shortly pick up the campaign theme put forward by Joe Biden about "defending democracy" in opposing Donald Trump. Harris and the Democrats have focused so intently on defending democracy, in fact, that they have negated the results of 50 state primaries to push Biden off the ballot over his polling. And defending democracy has so much import to Democrats that they anointed Harris rather than allow delegates an actual election at their convention in Chicago to choose their best nominee.

So how will Kamala Harris "defend democracy" as president? She'll bypass Congress and just issue orders to implement her preferred policies, natch, especially when it comes to gun control. Here's a Harris flashback (apparently from 2019) on how she'd impose "great ideas" on gun control if Congress won't pass her agenda:

These are the thoughts and words of an AUTHORITARIAN.

Take 20 seconds to listen and learn. pic.twitter.com/bzR8kB4QTQ

— L A R R Y (@LarryOConnor) July 30, 2024

Perhaps she misspoke, her defenders might say. If so, Harris did so more than once on the same topic. A Snopes fact-check in April 2019 defended Harris from an accusation that she declared that she would sign an executive order to confiscate firearms, a claim which was "inaccurate" in their estimation. However, they did quote Harris from a CNN town-hall event where she repeated what she told reporters in the above clip:

HARRIS: ... Supposed leaders in Washington, D.C., who have failed to have the courage to recognize, you know what, you want to go hunting, that's fine, but we need reasonable gun safety laws in this country, starting with universal background checks and a renewal of the assault weapon ban. But they have failed to have the courage to act.

So, Ben, here is my response to you. Upon being elected, I will give the United States Congress 100 days to get their act together and have the Courage to pass reasonable gun safety laws. And if they fail to do it, then I will take executive action.

Harris clearly means this in terms of an assault-weapons ban as well as the background checks she goes on to specify:

And specifically what I will do is put in place a requirement that for anyone who sells more than five guns a year, they are required to do background checks when they sell those guns. I will require that for any gun dealer that breaks the law, the ATF take their license. And by the way, ATF, alcohol, tobacco and firearms, well, the ATF has been doing a lot of the "A" and the "T," but not much of the "F." And we need to fix that.

Now, it's not terribly unusual for candidates to threaten to use EOs to force their agenda into action. Donald Trump quipped that he'd be Dictator for a Day on the same basis a few weeks ago, and Democrats lost their minds over it. But usually, the EOs are proposed in the context of existing executive authority, not in bypassing Congress as Harris repeatedly pledged during her first presidential run. 

Bypassing Congress as a way to "defend democracy" is ... weird, no? And doing so because Congress hasn't passed sweeping partisan legislation within less time than bills usually take just to get through one chamber's committee process is even weirder when the threat comes from a member of the Senate, no? 

Sounds a bit dictatorial, in fact. 

David Harsanyi warns that the unduly-anointed candidate Harris would unleash her authoritarian impulses once elected, and that evidence of this can be seen much more contemporaneously. He also reminds us of how Harris laughed off the idea that presidents are subject to constitutional limits:

Like any good authoritarian, Harris enforces whatever laws she sees fit to enforce whenever she sees fit. One of the reasons Harris allegedly opposed the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch was that the judge "consistently valued narrow legalisms" -- which is to say, respected the Constitution -- "over real lives."

Harris was never one for legalism. When candidate Biden argued that Harris' promise to issue an executive order unilaterally banning access to certain guns would be unconstitutional, she retorted: "I would just say: Hey, Joe, instead of saying 'No, we can't,' let's say 'yes, we can,'" before cackling at the very notion that presidents couldn't do whatever they wanted. ...

On foreign policy, we don't really know, though we can guess. This week, Harris wouldn't even greet Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. She didn't sit behind him during his speech to Congress. A few weeks ago, the same Harris said antisemitic pro-Hamas campus protesters showed "exactly what the human emotion should be." In the past, she has openly protested with Islamic Republic propagandists from the National Iranian American Council. To be fair, in some ways her disposition comports more with the latter than the former.

When I say Harris is an authoritarian, I'm not contending she's Hitler. I am saying she is a fan of obedience to authority, especially of Democrat-run government, at the expense of personal freedom in ways that are deeply un-American. That's a bad trend in politics, in general, but it's difficult to think of many politicians more wedded to the idea than Kamala Harris.

For that matter, we can see this during the Biden administration, too. Their border crisis began and blew up out of a refusal to follow the laws on securing the borders and enforcing illegal immigration as a crime. Harris herself flat-out rejected the idea that it should be treated as a crime, even though existing statute clearly makes it so. The Biden team, with Harris as the person assigned to deal with the border, simply ignored it until the last few months when it became clear that voters would punish Biden for it.

It's also true with the student-loan forgiveness executive orders Biden keeps issuing. The law gives the executive branch no authority for massive loan forgiveness. Such a project would require the appropriation of hundreds of billions of dollars, which the executive branch has no authority to create either. And yet Biden and by extension Harris keep trying to act as dictators to pay off their constituencies at the expense of everyone else. 

Those are just a couple of examples of growing authoritarianism in the Biden-Harris term. There are others, to be sure, and other examples of Harris' disregard for Congress that will emerge over the course of the next few weeks. When they do, you can bet that the NYT will shriek about "weaponizing" Harris' statements while insisting that you have to elect an authoritarian without a single vote in any primary contest to defend democracy.