Kirsten Gillibrand shrugs off a whole career of flip-flopping

The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate was asked this week during an interview on CBS’s “This Morning” to address the critics who say she will reverse course on any issue so long as it benefits her political career.

“It’s still the talk of dinner party conversations about Sen. Gillibrand that she flips and flops, that she betrayed the Clintons, that she seems to go with whatever the wind is blowing,” said CBS’ Gayle King. “I know you’ve heard that. How do you feel about that, and how do you address it?”

Gillibrand responded, saying, “It’s certainly not my record, not who I am. It’s true that my first election was a 2-1 Republican district in upstate New York. I was able to run that campaign on getting out of Iraq and [on] ‘Medicare for all’, but still won a 2-1 Republican district. And won re-election by a 24-point margin.”

This one is simple enough. Let’s review her record.

When Gillibrand served in the House of Representatives between 2007 and 2009, she was rightly considered a moderate — a so-called Blue Dog Democrat. She was proudly conservative on several key issues, including immigration and gun control. The Daily Beast actually characterized her in 2008 as a “bizarro version of Sarah Palin.”

But then Gillibrand set her sights on the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. Working closely with her political patrons, who also happened to be the Clintons, Gillibrand was elected senator and moved up in the party’s ranks. Since that time, Gillibrand’s career in Congress’ upper chamber has been one long series of flip-flops, one after the other.

Just look at how she had changed on protecting Second Amendment rights. As a congresswoman, Gillibrand received an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association. She touted this well-earned distinction regularly, much to the chagrin of anti-gun crusaders. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, said of Gillibrand in 2009 that he had a “strong disagreement with one area of her record as a member of Congress: illegal guns.”

He added, “She has actively opposed the efforts of New York City, and cities around the state and nation, to enact commonsense measures to keep illegal guns out of the hands of criminals.”

The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd even called Gillibrand “an N.R.A. handmaiden in Bobby Kennedy’s old seat.”

But then Gillibrand won her Senate race and it wasn’t long before she discovered a newfound appreciation for her party’s efforts to enact stricter gun control measures. And the newly minted senator didn’t leave it at just signaling her support – she soon took active steps to fight against the House version of herself.

“Gillibrand came out and opposed one of the very bills she had cosponsored in the House” on the Second Amendment, National Journal reported in 2013.

Later, in 2017, when Gillibrand was confronted in an interview regarding her gun control flip-flop, she defended herself by saying, “I didn’t actually take the time to understand the issue as well as I should have … I should have been a lot smarter and a lot more sensitive.” Gillibrand grew bolder in her defenses, saying that same year she “never changed” her “values.”

I’m having a difficult time believing she evolved naturally from bragging about “keeping shotguns under her bed” to calling for a “women’s crusade” for stricter gun control laws, considering the only thing that changed in all that time was her title in Congress. It’s not as if she was granted access to new information upon becoming a U.S. Senator. The relevant information she claims changed her mind was always there, even when she was bragging about her “A” rating from the NRA.

Then there’s the matter of immigration. As a congresswoman, Gillibrand explicitly opposed giving “amnesty to illegal aliens.” In fact, as CBS News’ Sharyn Alfonsi noted last year, Rep. Gillibrand’s position on immigration was closer to President Trump’s than anything else.

But then Gillibrand became a senator, and she soon found herself singing a new tune. Almost too quickly, as Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute suggested in 2013 when she said she was “extremely intrigued by how quickly [Gillibrand] changed her stance.”

The senator has gone so far as to call for the abolishment of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She has also said that ICE shouldn’t be abolished, but that it should merely be given a makeover. Gillibrand claimed in December 2017 that she hasn’t flip-flopped on immigration, arguing that she merely discovered that she was “limited” in her views.

“I didn’t know enough,” she said of her newfound appreciation for the party’s ultra-permissive pro-immigration platform. “It was a huge flaw I had to fix.”

Lastly, there’s Gillibrand’s current position on LGBT rights, which is basically the exact opposite of where she was as a congresswoman, back when she received the lowest rating of any New York Democrat from the pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign. In 2009, after coming to the Senate, Gillibrand endorsed the legalization of same-sex marriage in the Empire State. Interestingly enough, she specifically declined to endorse this when she served the state’s 20th Congressional District.

That Gillibrand’s sudden evolutions have coincided with her becoming a U.S. Senator is, I’m sure, a coincidence. It’s amazing what politics can do to a person’s supposedly firm beliefs.