As Vice President Kamala Harris moves to the front of the line to become the Democratic nominee for President after Joe Biden‘s withdrawal from the race and endorsement of her, Democrats hungry for someone to take up a vigorous fight against the GOP nominee Donald Trump have pitched the potential matchup as a battle between an experienced, hard-nosed prosecutor (Harris) and a convicted felon (Trump).
Harris, many believe, has been less effective at the soft-skills, glad-handing aspects of the Vice President’s office than she is at the harder stuff — and her biggest backers contend that she is most in her element as a prosecutor and legislator cutting through obfuscation.
Those particular Harris credentials were most prominently on national view during her questioning, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court.
In the video above, Harris’s line of questioning gets Justice Brett Kavanaugh to agree to take a polygraph test — “I’ll do whatever the committee wants” — even as he reminds viewers that polygraphs are “not reliable.”
[Harris is questioning Kavanaugh about allegations of misconduct made against him by several women before his confirmation hearings — and whether he had taken a polygraph concerning those allegations and whether he would support a request to the White House to authorize a related FBI investigation.]
Polygraph tests — commonly known as “lie detector” tests — aren’t admissible in federal court, but that doesn’t stop attorneys from using them for various reasons.
Indeed, the Connecticut law firm Spinelli & Associates asserts that “the polygraph is ubiquitous; used at every level of government, as well as by private corporations, law enforcement, public and private investigators, and public and private attorneys.”
Showing the same prosecutorial instincts Democrats hope she will bring to her run for the presidency, Harris also doggedly pursued answers from Kavanaugh about potential discussions he’d had — and with whom — about the Mueller investigation, questions which Kavanaugh elided. See below.
(Harris also pushed Kavanaugh on abortion — pre-Dobbs — asking: “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?”)
Showing Harris in a similar position, the former Senator’s questioning of future Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett — via video feed — is below:
[NOTE: Cornell Law School writes about polygraphs that “the purpose of the test is usually to prove whether or not a person committed a crime. The test cannot actually test for honesty, however. Instead, it relies on the polygraph operator’s analysis of the tested person’s responses, which can be inaccurate. As such, polygraphs are usually not admissible as evidence in United States courts.”]