Scrutinizing Kamala Harris

But that is not accurate. She took positions on a range of pending bills and at least one proposed ballot initiative, according to her archived news releases. (We found more than a dozen examples.)

Harris’s staff told The Fact Checker that she misheard Tapper’s question and misspoke in response.

  WaPo

That's interesting.  Her answer looks pretty clearly responsive to the question, and is very clear about stating she did not weigh in on bills and initiatives, even giving a reason why not.

After amendments, [the] 2015 bill would have required the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor in cases when police use of force results in death.

Harris did not take a position on the bill, which eventually expired in the legislature.

[...]

Harris fairly often issued news releases announcing her support for different bills. She publicly opposed and won a court battle to block a gruesome ballot initiative calling for the killing of gay people.

[...]

Harris’s responsibility to write a “title and summary” applied only for ballot initiatives that had been cleared for an election, an adviser said, not legislation or proposed initiatives like the one targeting gay people. The adviser wrote in an email that Harris did not take a position on McCarty’s bill because “she was concerned about taking away authority from locally elected DAs (of which she is a former one) who are held accountable by their constituents.”

That answer is consistent with Harris’s comments at the time.

“I don’t think it would be good public policy to take the discretion from elected district attorneys,” Harris told the San Francisco Chronicle in late 2014.

Wait a minute. That sounds precisely like taking a position on the bill.

“The next year ... she actually came out with a recommendation on this,” McCarty [the bill's author] said.

[...]

“She did come around, and I was very pleased.”

So...she took a position on it twice, right?

“I think she had to walk a fine line being the state’s top cop and the practical purposes of such a position, and the fact that she had experience coming up as a DA,” he said.

She's an able politician, in other words.

Harris has drawn criticism, such as in an op-ed in the New York Times, as being too tough a law enforcement officer. Her campaign noted that she opposes the death penalty and implemented a first-of-its-kind training program on implicit bias. She required her officers at the California Department of Justice to wear body cameras. Among other initiatives mentioned by the campaign, Harris also created a prisoner reentry and diversion program for nonviolent drug offenders as the San Francisco district attorney and continued it as attorney general.

Harris won praise from criminal justice reform advocates for creating an online database of police use of force, including fatal shootings.

Doesn't sound like someone who is too tough.

A generation after Democrats embraced “tough on crime” policies that swelled prison populations, progressive activists are pushing to make the criminal justice system less punitive and racist — and polls show a majority of Democrats support such efforts. Harris argues that her views align with the new progressive movement. But her record in California, where she was a prosecutor, district attorney, and state attorney general before representing the state in the US Senate, is likely to come in for harsh scrutiny and debate in the coming months.

Harris argues that she’s fought to reverse incarceration, scale back the war on drugs, and address racial disparities in the criminal justice system. But as her star has risen nationally — she’s had several viral moments questioning President Donald Trump’s nominees in the Senate — those more familiar with her criminal justice record, particularly on the left, have increasingly voiced their skepticism.

[...]

A close examination of Harris’s record shows it’s filled with contradictions. She pushed for programs that helped people find jobs instead of putting them in prison, but also fought to keep people in prison even after they were proved innocent. She refused to pursue the death penalty against a man who killed a police officer, but also defended California’s death penalty system in court. She implemented training programs to address police officers’ racial biases, but also resisted calls to get her office to investigate certain police shootings.

[...]

Harris’s parents worked on civil rights causes, and she came from a background well aware of the excesses of the criminal justice system — but in office, she had to play the role of a prosecutor and California’s lawyer. [...] She had an eye on higher political office as support for criminal justice reform became de rigueur for Democrats — but she still had to work as California’s top law enforcement official.

  Vox

Perhaps, but she didn't have to run for the position in the first place.

As she became more nationally visible, Harris was less known as a progressive prosecutor, as she’d been earlier in her career, and more a reform-lite or even anti-reform attorney general.

[...]

On the first day of her campaign, Harris partially addressed the concerns, taking “full responsibility” for some of the actions that her office took but offering few details about why Democratic voters should expect different from President Harris. How she continues responding to these criticisms could determine how far her campaign goes.

I think it's going to be tough for her.

From the beginning of Harris’s career in the criminal justice system, she said she saw herself as a progressive working within a system she wanted to change — “at the table where the decisions are made,” she told the New York Times Magazine in 2016.

I guess that could explain why she became a prosecutor and ran for DA and AG.

In her new memoir, The Truths We Hold, Harris described how she saw her role: “The job of a progressive prosecutor is to look out for the overlooked, to speak up for those whose voices aren’t being heard, to see and address the causes of crime, not just their consequences, and to shine a light on the inequality and unfairness that lead to injustice. It is to recognize that not everyone needs punishment, that what many need, quite plainly, is help.”

[...]

In one instance — her handling of California’s “three strikes” law — Harris was arguably ahead of the time. Under the law, someone who committed a third felony could go to prison for 25 years to life, even if the third felony was a nonviolent crime. But Harris required that the San Francisco district attorney’s office only charge for a third strike if the felony was a serious or violent crime.

[...]

“When she became district attorney, no one was talking about progressive prosecutors,” Tim Silard, who worked under Harris at the San Francisco district attorney’s office, told me. “She was absolutely an outlier within the California District Attorneys Association, [and] got some pushback and criticism from there.”

[...]

“There’s been incredibly rapid change in public opinion, in attention to criminal justice,” Silard said, citing his decades-long experience in the criminal justice system and current experience as president of the reform-minded Rosenberg Foundation. “Bringing a reverse lens to that is not fair, and also doesn’t recognize folks who were courageous at that time.”

[...]

Based on Harris’s record, supporters easily could have expected her to come into the California Department of Justice as attorney general and really shake things up. But that didn’t happen: Her office’s handling of over-incarceration, the death penalty, and wrongly incarcerated people were among the several issues in which Harris by and large maintained the status quo.

She implemented some reforms [...] But Harris also allowed many parts of the Justice Department to essentially operate as they long had, which at times led to what many now see as major injustices. In many cases, this led to her office making decisions that Harris, under scrutiny, tried to distance herself from.

Kind of hard to distance yourself from an office you head.

For example, Harris’s office fought to release fewer prisoners, even after the US Supreme Court found that overcrowding in California prisons was so bad that it amounted to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment. At one point, her lawyers argued that the state couldn’t release some prisoners because it would deplete its pool for prison labor — but Harris quickly clarified that she was not aware her office was going with that argument until it was reported by media.

Yeah, I don't think that's a good look, either. I didn't know what my people were doing.

And, Jesus Christ! What an argument!

Or consider Harris’s handling of appeals for release by innocent people in prison. In one case, her office argued against Daniel Larsen, who was proven innocent by the Innocence Project, because, Harris’s office claimed, he filed his petition for release far too late after a legal deadline. The court disagreed, allowing Larsen’s release in 2013. (In the New York Times, Bazelon lists several more such cases.)

Harris’s supporters argue that Harris likely wasn’t closely involved in these cases because Justice Department policy didn’t require state lawyers to seek approval from the attorney general

Well, that's just bonehead shit right there, California.

But Harris could have changed department policy and become more hands-on in pushing reform, if she was willing to risk a potential backlash from the people under her.

And possibly causing her to lose her position next election.

Harris remains personally opposed to the death penalty, and earlier in her career, she’d been willing to incur political backlash by refusing to seek it in 2004. But as attorney general, she told voters she would enforce capital punishment. And she did: In 2014, she appealed a judge’s decision that deemed California’s death penalty system unconstitutional.

Harris didn’t have to do this. In another case, she declined to defend Proposition 8, which prohibited same-sex marriage.

But in office, she seemed to avoid antagonizing the rank and file — which opposition to the death penalty and other “tough on crime” policies could do.

[...]

Harris also overlooked and defended law enforcement officials accused of misconduct. In one such case, a state prosecutor, Robert Murray, falsified a confession, using it to threaten the defendant with life in prison. After a court threw out the indictment, Harris’s office appealed it, dismissing the misconduct because it did not involve physical violence.

Did she know about that? Or was that another case she didn't get involved in? Either way, it's a bad look.

[Since coming to the Senate, Harris has] described her support for criminal justice reform as pushing for a better return on investment, pointing out that US prisons see recidivism rates as high as 70 percent or more.

[...]

In the Senate, Harris has consistently backed reforms, although her leadership role on these issues hasn’t been as extensive as that of some other senators.

[...]

She introduced a bail reform bill with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that would encourage states to reform or replace their bail systems. This is a big part of the criminal justice system: By most estimates, hundreds of thousands of people are in jail right now, before they’ve been convicted of a crime, just because they can’t afford to pay their bail. [...] But the bill hasn’t moved far in Congress — although it’s now part of Harris’s presidential campaign platform.

In a team-up with Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Tim Scott (R-SC), Harris also introduced a bill that would for the first time make lynching a federal crime, which has long been a goal for racial justice and civil rights activists. The bill passed the Senate but didn’t get through the House.

Harris also voted for the First Step Act, the most significant federal criminal justice reform bill to get through Congress in decades — although she tweeted at length about the bill’s shortcomings. She signed on to Booker’s marijuana legalization bill, and voted for a bill that legalized hemp.

Other Democratic senators, though, have gone a bit further on criminal justice issues.

[...]

Harris’s limited role so far is perhaps expected for a junior senator, but it may be disappointing for people expecting more from a presidential contender with roots in the criminal justice system and who promised something closer to “a wholesale reconstruction” than tinkering at the edges.

But at least when the issue comes to a vote, she’s so far consistently been on the reform side in the Senate — and has made support for reform central to her presidential campaign.

[...]

In response to the criticisms, Harris said during the first day of her presidential campaign that she took “responsibility” for some of the problems: “The bottom line is the buck stops with me, and I take full responsibility for what my office did.”

I really hate that cop-out. Politicians are always saying it, but there are no consequences, so what does it mean to take responsibility?

Harris has explained that she rejects what she describes as “the false choice” between criminal justice reform and supporting law enforcement.

“I will never make an excuse for saying this, or an apology for saying this: One human being kills another human being, a woman is raped, a child is molested, there needs to be serious consequence and accountability,” she said during a one-hour interview for her new book in January.

Has anyone asked her how she feels about impeachment of Trump?

I don't agree with the comments in the following tweet, but watching the video (a pre-Senate one, I assume), I'm not favorably impressed by Ms. Harris' seeming glee at "freaking [people] out."



I take her point, but there's something very offputting about the way she's talking about it.

Another video that seems a little at odds with her campaign:



Here's one more from the same Twitter account, and I don't see in it what the tweet claims.  It's obvious Jermane Willis is not a Kamala Harris fan.  I, myself, am conflicted.  I appreciate the way she went after some of the slime balls who've testified before Senate committees, but I'm not sure I can take four years of her speeches if these are representative, and what I find to be an offputting demeanor.  (Admission:  someone once said to me, "Aaaaaah, the POPE wouldn't be good enough for YOU."  And that's not a faulty assessment.)

There it is. As seen in those videos. The Thanks-Hon look that will gag me if she keeps it up on the campaign circuit.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: Deconstructed podcast discussing Harris.