How The ACLU Lobbied Kamala Harris To Support Illegal Immigrant Trans Surgeries

Of candidate questionnaires and ideological inquisitions

Working with a research team a decade ago, I discovered that the most active and influential email list in Oklahoma conservative politics belonged to a group of certified John Birchers. Their organization, Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee (OCPAC), watched Republican state legislators closely, assigning scores to every vote they made, even minor and procedural. Then they published the scores in a widely-read newsletter.

That’s it. That’s the one neat trick to taking control of an American state legislature. Just condition the individual office-holders of the party that is in power at the state capitol to regard their arbitrary scores as meaningful, and the politicians will do the rest themselves. Candidate scorecards are an effective way to lobby a political party in any direction across a range of issues.

In 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asked Kamala Harris, who was running for president in 2020, a series of questions. You can read them, as well as he…