In the bluster of the media’s rebrand of Harris as the hero of democracy amid “Brat Summer,” the record of the California senator, who was once the most liberal in the entire chamber, was rewritten. Harris, who co-sponsored Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, was allowed to pull a complete 180 quietly on her past support for nationalizing nearly a third of the American economy by banning private health insurance and creating a federal jobs guarantee. After running an entire previous presidential campaign on promising to decriminalize the act of illegally crossing the southern border, Harris has been allowed, without media criticism, to cut ads in front of Trump’s border wall — the same one the Biden-Harris administration had taken to court to prevent its continued, congressionally authorized construction.

The press were sanguine enough over the swift and silent palace coup that replaced Biden with a candidate not one primary voter had elected, allowing Harris a full 39 days as the de facto nominee before the public pressure cajoled her to sit for a single interview. And even in her 18-minute interview, Harris was allowed to bring her emotional-support running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN). The media have little interest in challenging Harris over her litany of policy reversals, lest they be cast as the villains of a Trump victory in 2024 as the Clinton campaign succeeded in doing to the New York Times in 2016 over the Gray Lady’s coverage of Clinton’s illegal email server. In other words, when Harris says her “values have not changed” from the time she voted more radically than the self-proclaimed socialist of the Senate, journalists believe her.

In one of Harris’s rare, unscripted interviews — she and Walz have only sat for 18 in the time that Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), have sat for a combined 58 — Harris reverted to form, pledging support for obliterating one of the Senate’s last remaining safeguards, the legislative filibuster.

“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe [v. Wade],” Harris told Wisconsin Public Radio. “And get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”

To be clear, the bill she is referencing here, the Women’s Health Protection Act, would not merely codify Roe in federally legalizing abortion through the point of fetal viability, now as low as 21 weeks of gestation. The WHPA, which she and Biden have backed, would federally legalize abortion through the end of pregnancy, a position 70% of voters say should be illegal.

This position is not the mere opposite of Trump’s. It is the inverse. In defiance of the GOP’s loudest voices on the issue, Trump has promised to reserve the right to regulate abortion to the states, and he has even criticized more restrictive state bans, such as Florida’s six-week abortion ban, as being too extreme. Harris isn’t just pledging to transform the Senate fundamentally and further federalize politics, but she’s also doing so in a way a more radical Republican than Trump could reverse by accruing 50 votes to ban all abortions at any time in all 50 states.

And, of course, Harris wants to erode further the norms of Congress in opposition to her 2017 plea to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to preserve the legislative filibuster.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Politicians are indeed capable of evolving, even doing so on occasion in a way that isn’t purely cynical politicking, but has Harris provided any evidence of an authentic ideological journey that would inform her total reversal on criminalizing fracking or nationalizing the entire energy and healthcare industries? Or, more likely, are her carefully scripted word salads, such as her soliloquies about protecting the Second Amendment, mere haphazard attempts to conceal that which has not changed: that she still supports “assault weapons” bans and mandatory gun confiscation?

When Trump jests he wants to be a dictator for a day, the media would have us take him seriously. When Harris tells us she wants the federal government to encroach upon states’ rights permanently and blow up a guardrail of democracy in the process, we must take her literally.