There have been a ton of them of late, but the spit-take-inducing policy reversals by Kamala Harris – my personal favorites are her declaration that she’s now a fan of building a border wall, her complete 180 on fracking and the fact she’s backing Donald Trump’s “no tax on tips” pledge – have been the prime subject of conversation on the presidential campaign trail this week.

I had a short discussion of how to handle the Kamala flip-flops in my Five Quick Things column at The American Spectator this morning…

They’re accumulating, of course. First there was the adoption of Trump’s “no tax on tips” pledge, and then there was the repudiation of her position on banning hydraulic fracturing. And, of course, the new interest in building a border wall.

JD Vance is on the stump ripping Kamala Harris for stealing Trump’s policy positions, and, of course, to raise the issue of the theft is entirely legitimate.

But Ace of Spades says Vance is going about this wrong, and he’s got a good point:

This is the wrong line of attack. Completely, utterly wrong.

If you say she’s stealing Trump’s policies, that mean she is going to implement the policies people want. Which is much more important to them than squabbling about who gets credit.

Trump did the same thing with DeSantis. I mean, 1, I don’t know if “enforce the border” is exactly a new policy position, and 2, what does it matter who originated a policy if it’s a good idea? Do we shy away from borrowing Reagan’s ideas of low tax/low regulation and peace through strength because he thought of them (or, at least, was the first major adopter)?

The real attack should be that Kamala Harris is lying. She knows her actual policies are unpopular, so she’s lying about them so she can get elected and impose them on an unwilling population.

She’s not stealing the policy. She’s lying about the policy. She has absolutely no intention of implementing “Trump’s policies.”

And if you tell people that she’s going to implement Trump’s very popular, common-sense policies– they’ll say, “Well good! We get Trump’s policies without Trump’s baggage.”

Is squabbling about “credit” more important than that?

Ace says the answer is to demand that Harris explain why, if these are her policies, she isn’t acting to make them a reality now, in the administration that she’s part of.

What I’d add to that is the proof of the lie. For example, the “no tax on tips” flip-flop is awfully hard to justify seeing as though she’s the No. 2 in an administration that is hiring 80,000-odd IRS agents whose jobs entail chasing people down for taxes on their tips. What happens to those new IRS agents, Kamala? Are they just going to hang around the office and eat crullers all day? Because you certainly won’t be laying them off.

The point being, as Ace noted, that she’s obviously, provably lying. So you acknowledge that yes, these are good policies, and yes, it would be nice if there truly was bipartisan agreement on getting them done, but no, Kamala isn’t for them, she actively works against them, and she hates the American people so much that she would tell bald-faced lies about her policy positions just to get elected and have power over her fellow man.

It’s vitally important to call out the lies, and to use them to illuminate the utter cynicism and contempt that lies underneath them.

We know this especially in Louisiana, because of the John Bel Edwards experience.

Remember back in 2015 when Edwards was first running for governor? He told lie after lie, but two of them were especially notable.

One was sort of a “macro” lie, which was that Edwards was a “conservative” or “centrist” Democrat. The other was a specific lie, which was that he was opposed to tax increases to deal with the “fiscal cliff” that Louisiana faced as a result of then-declining oil prices.

The “macro” lie was swallowed whole by the state’s legacy media, which elevated Edwards from a fringe-y nobody of a candidate to the frontrunner of the race at the same time a pile of national (read: Hard Left) Democrat money poured in as David Vitter began to be worn down by the never-ending narratives about his past sexual infidelity.

But it was a provable lie. Edwards wasn’t a “conservative” and he wasn’t a “centrist.” He’d spent eight years in the Louisiana legislature and had a significant voting record, and that record was Hard Left. So much so, in fact, that Edwards’ voting record as expressed by the LABI scorecard was worse than any member of the Legislative Black Caucus.

The only basis for claiming that he was “centrist” was that Edwards expressed a pro-life position, without which he would never have gotten elected in his rural North Tangipahoa Parish-based House district. That, and he claimed to be “pro-gun,” which he exposed as a lie when he vetoed various Second Amendment bills as governor.

Once in office, Edwards was anything but “centrist.” He spent most of his second term trying to stop the state legislature from banning men from playing girls’ sports and lots of other attempts to keep radical leftist cultural aggressions from taking hold here.

But the specific lie, which probably relates best to Harris, was that Edwards repeatedly claimed he could “fix” Louisiana’s budget without tax increases.

But then he won, mostly because voters thought the stories about Vitter dallying with prostitutes were too icky to make him governor, and everything changed. Edwards put forth a blizzard of tax increases and threatened every dire consequence imaginable, including the suspension of college football in Louisiana, if he wasn’t given them…

And he acted surprised. He justified his about-face on the necessity of tax increases by saying the state’s budget situation was worse than he knew.

Of course, John Bel Edwards had voted for six of Bobby Jindal’s eight state budgets during his time in the legislature. Bel Edwards was no innocent naif. He knew exactly what the budget situation was.

The fact was, there was no fiscal cliff. Louisiana only faced a budget deficit because Edwards’ first budget increased state spending by a massive amount, and his gigantic tax hikes generated a surplus even with the spending increase.

Which sounds like pretty good fiscal policy except for the fact that the better part of a quarter million more Louisianans picked up and left the state for greener pastures like Texas, Florida and Tennessee and we became a net-outmigration basket case to rival Illinois, California and New York, at least on a per-capita basis. Louisiana spent the past eight years completely missing out on the boom economy that has turned so many Southern states into economic powerhouses, and we’re now in a significant economic-development hole it’s going to be difficult to get out of.

Things got so bad that Edwards essentially prayed for a hurricane to hit the state every year, because federal hurricane recovery dollars were more or less the only outside injection of capital Louisiana’s economy could get. We went eight years with practically nothing to claim as an economic development win, employment in Louisiana dropped precipitously and companies sold out or moved out.

John Bel Edwards’ time as our governor was essentially a lost decade. When a Democrat lies his or her way to the middle, our experience shows that what you’ll get is the worst possible result.

Believe nothing of Kamala’s flip-flops on those issues. When the election is over, she’ll revert back to her record as a Marxist radical, just like John Bel Edwards did here in Louisiana.