The Official Kamala Harris Thread

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Any black woman married to a cracka in this country automatically gets the side eye from me...

Hmmm. Let’s see her bio (Wiki):

Kamala Devi Harris (/ˈkɑːmələ/, KAH-mə-lə; born October 20, 1964) is an American attorney and politician. She is a member of the Democratic Party. Harris has served as the juniorUnited States Senator from California since 2017. She had previously served as the 32nd Attorney General of California from 2011 to 2017.

Born in Oakland, California, Harris is a graduate of Howard University and University of California, Hastings College of the Law. In the 1990s, Harris worked in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and the City Attorney of San Francisco's office. In 2004, Harris was elected District Attorney of San Francisco.

Harris was elected California's Attorney General in 2010 and reelected in 2014. On November 8, 2016, she defeated Loretta Sanchezin the 2016 Senate election to succeed outgoing Senator Barbara Boxer, becoming California's third female U.S. Senator and the first of Jamaican or Indian descent.[1][2]

Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California to TamilIndian mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris (1938–2009) and Jamaicanfather, Donald Harris. Her mother was a breast cancer researcher, who emigrated from Chennai (then Madras), Tamil Nadu, India, in 1960,[3][4]and her father a Stanford University economics professor who emigrated from Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study in economics at University of California, Berkeley.[9] Her name, Kamala, comes from the Sanskrit word for lotus. She was extremely close to her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopalan, an Indian diplomat,[4][10] and as a child, she frequently visited her family in Besant Nagar, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.[11] She has one younger sister, Maya.[12][13]

The family lived in Berkeley, California, where both of Harris' parents attended graduate school.[14] Harris' parents divorced when she was 7 and her mother was granted custody of the children by court-ordered settlement.[14] After the divorce, her mother moved with the children to Montreal, Québec, Canada, where Shyamala took a position doing research at the Jewish General Hospital and teaching at McGill University.[15][16]

After graduating from Montreal's Westmount High School in Quebec, Harris attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in political science and economics.[17][18] At Howard, Harris was elected to the liberal arts student council as freshman class representative, was a member of the debate team, and joined the Alpha Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.[17]

Harris then returned to California, earning her Juris Doctor (J.D.) from University of California, Hastings College of the Law, in 1989.[19][8] She was admitted to the State Bar of California in 1990.[20]

Main article: Electoral history of Kamala Harris

Harris (back, second from the left) celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Harris served as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California, from 1990 to 1998. Harris says she sought a career in law enforcement because she wanted to be "at the table where decisions are made."[8] In 1993, she started dating California Speaker of the Assembly Willie Brown, who introduced her to many powerful individuals in the California and Sacramento political and campaign management establishment.[21] In 2000, San Francisco's elected City Attorney, Louise Renne, recruited Harris to join her office, where she was chief of the Community and Neighborhood Division, which oversees civil code enforcement matters.[22]

After the Fajitagate scandal, Harris defeated two-term incumbent Terence Hallinan in the 2003 election to become District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco.[23]

In April 2004, San Francisco Police Department Officer Isaac Espinoza was shot and killed in the line of duty.[8] Three days later D.A. Harris announced she would not seek the death penalty, infuriating the San Francisco Police Officers Association.[8] During Officer Espinoza's funeral at St. Mary's Cathedral, U.S. Senator and former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein rose to the pulpit and called on Harris, who was sitting in the front pew, to secure the death penalty, prompting a standing ovation from the 2,000 uniformed police officers in attendance.[8] Harris still refused.[8] Officer Espinoza's killer was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison.[8] Shortly thereafter, Harris demoted veteran career prosecutor Paul Cummins, the chief assistant to her predecessor who former officer Joe O'Sullivan described as "the most ethical prosecutor I've met", from the 80-person felony prosecution unit to Harris's former position in the DA's office.[24]

As D.A., Harris started a program that gives first-time drug dealers the chance to earn a high school diploma and find employment.[8] Over eight years, the program produced fewer than 300 graduates, but achieved a very low recidivism rate.[8] Harris was re-elected in 2007 when she ran unopposed.[25]

In 2009, Harris wrote Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer,[26] in which she looked at criminal justice from an economic perspective and attempted to reduce temptation and access for criminals.[27] The book discusses a series of "myths" surrounding the criminal justice system and presents proposals to reduce and prevent crime.[27] Recognized by The Los Angeles Daily Journal as one of the top 100 lawyers in California, Harris served on the board of the California District Attorney's Association and was vice president of the National District Attorneys Association.[28]

She has been outspoken on the need for innovation in public safety, particularly with respect to reducing the recidivism rate in San Francisco.[29] One such program, "Back on Track", was signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as a model program for the state.[30][31]Initially, there were issues with removing illegal immigrants from the program, such as an incident involving Alexander Izaguirre, who was later arrested for assault.[32] The program was revised to address that concern, barring anyone who could not legally be employed in the United States.[33] Harris also protected informants with the Nuestra Familiaprison gang who were engaged in illegal activities including drug trafficking and weapon possession.[34]

While Harris was the San Francisco District Attorney, the overall felonyconviction rate rose from 52% in 2003 to 67% in 2006, the highest in a decade; there was an 85% conviction rate for homicides, and convictions of drug dealers increased from 56% in 2003 to 74% in 2006.[35] While these statistics represent only trial convictions, Harris also closed many cases via plea bargains.[36] When she took office, she took a special interest in clearing part of the murder caseload from the previous administration. Harris claimed that the records from that administration were less than optimal, and worked to get convictions on what she could. That meant that out of the 73 homicide cases backlogged, 32 cases took deals for lesser charges such as manslaughter or took pleas to other crimes such as assault or burglary while the murder charges were dismissed.[37]


Harris holding a press conference with law enforcement agents
However, the San Francisco DA's incarceration rates were among the lowest in the entire state of California—fully ten times lower than in San Diego County, for example. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "roughly 4 of every 100 arrests resulted in prison terms in San Francisco, compared with 12.8 out of 100 in Alameda County, 14.4 of 100 in Sacramento County, 21 of 100 in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, 26.6 of 100 in Fresno County, 38.7 of 100 in Los Angeles County and 41 of 100 in San Diego County."[38] Police also noted that lenient sentencing from San Francisco judges also played a role in this.[38]

While officers within the SFPD credited Harris with tightening loopholes in bail and drug programs that defendants had exploited in the past, they also accused her of being too deliberate in her prosecution of murder suspects.[39] Additionally, in 2009, San Francisco prosecutors won a lower percentage of their felony jury trials than their counterparts at district attorneys' offices covering the 10 largest cities in California, according to data on case outcomes compiled by officials at the San Francisco Superior Court as well as by other county courts and prosecutors. (Officials in Sacramento, the sixth-largest city in California, did not provide data.) Harris's at-trial felony conviction rate that year was 76%, down 12 points from the previous year. By contrast, the then-most recent recorded statewide average was 83%, according to statistics from the California Judicial Council.[40] In a small sample, a report computed that the conviction rate for felony trials in San Francisco County in the first three months of 2010 was just 53%.[40] San Francisco has historically had one of the lowest conviction rates in the state; the county is known for a defendant-friendly jury pool.[41][40]

In 2012, Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo ruled that San Francisco District Attorney Harris' office violated defendants' rights by hiding damaging information about a police crime lab technician, and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings.[42]

As San Francisco District Attorney, Harris created a special Hate Crimes Unit, focusing on hate crimes against LGBT children and teens in schools. She convened a national conference to confront the "gay-transgenderpanic defense", which has been used to justify violent hate crimes.[43]Harris supports same-sex marriage in California and opposed both Proposition 22 and Proposition 8.[44]

In 2004, The National Urban League honored Harris as a "Woman of Power"; in 2005, she received the Thurgood Marshall Award from the National Black Prosecutors Association. In her campaign for California Attorney General, she received the endorsements of numerous groups, including EMILY's List; California Legislative Black Caucus; Asian American Action Fund; Black Women Organized for Political Action; the National Women's Political Caucus; Mexican American Bar Association; and South Asians for Opportunity.[45]

Main article: California Attorney General election, 2010

Harris being sworn-in as Attorney General
On November 12, 2008, Harris announced her candidacy for California Attorney General. Both of California's United States Senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, endorsed Harris during the Democratic Party primary.[46] In the June 8, 2010, primary, she was nominated with 33.6% of the vote. Her closest competitors had 15.6% and 15.5% respectively.[47][48]

In her campaign for California Attorney General, Harris received the endorsements of United Farm Workers cofounder Dolores Huerta, United Educators of San Francisco, and San Francisco Firefighters Local 798.[45]She also received the endorsement of Antonio Villaraigosa, Mayor of Los Angeles.[49] In the general election, she faced Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley. On election night, November 2, 2010, Cooley prematurely declared victory, but many ballots remained uncounted. On November 24, as the count advanced, Harris was leading by more than 55,000 votes, and Cooley conceded.[50] On January 3, 2011, Harris became the first female,[28] Jamaican American,[49][51] and Indian American attorney general in California.[52][53]


Harris speaking at a US Department of Justice event
In 2012, she sent a letter to 100 mobile-app developers, asking them to comply with California law with respect to privacy issues.[54] If any developer of an application that could be used by a Californian does not display a privacy policy statement when the application is installed, California law is broken, with a possible fine $2500 for every download. The law affects any developer anywhere in the world if the app is used by a Californian.[55]

At the 2012 Democratic National Convention Harris gave a prime-time speech attacking Mitt Romney.[8] During the second Obama administration, Harris was mentioned as a possible nominee for a seat on the United States Supreme Court if a seat on that court became vacant.[56] In February 2016, The New York Times identified her as a potential US Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.[57]

Main article: California Attorney General election, 2014

Harris right, with her sister, Maya, at San Francisco City Hall in February 2014.
Harris announced her intention to run for re-election in February 2014 and filed paperwork to run on February 12. According to the office of California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, Harris had raised the money for her campaign during the previous year in 2013.[58] On August 13, 2014, Harris announced her endorsement of Betty Yeefor California State Controller, calling her one of the state's "most knowledgeable and responsible money managers," and said she was proud to endorse her. Yee, in return, sang Harris's praises and called her an "outstanding elected leader."[59]Harris also endorsed Bonnie Dumanis[60] and Sandra Fluke.[61] Harris herself was endorsed by The Sacramento Bee,[62] Los Angeles Daily News,[63] and The Los Angeles Times.[64]

On November 4, 2014, Harris was re-elected against Republican Ronald Gold.[65]

In September 2014, when US Attorney General Eric Holder announced his intention to step down, it was speculated that Harris might be a potential candidate as the next US Attorney General.[66] Days after Holder's resignation, Harris addressed the speculation in a statement declining any intent to take the office and asserting that she was staying in her position as Attorney General of California.[67] Two months later, in November 2014, President Barack Obama nominated Loretta Lynch to succeed Holder.[68] On November 10, Harris issued a statement regarding the nomination that approved of Obama's decision, praised Lynch, and reaffirmed her choice to remain working with the California Department of Justice.[69]


Harris' official portrait as Attorney General
When Harris took office, California was still reeling from the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis. Harris participated in the National Mortgage Settlement against five banks: Ally Financial, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citibank, and Chase. She originally walked off the talks because she believed the deal was too lenient. She later rejoined the talks, securing $12 billion of debt reduction for the state's homeowners and $26 billion overall.[70] Other parts of the funding would go to state housing counseling services and legal help for struggling homeowners and forgiving the debt of over 23,000 homeowners who agreed to sell their homes for less than the mortgage loan.[71]

Later, she introduced the California Homeowner's Bill of Rights in the California State Legislature, a package of several bills that would give homeowners more "options when fighting to keep their home". The Bill, which took effect on January 1, 2013, banned the practices of "dual-tracking" (processing a modification and foreclosure at the same time) and robo-signing, and provided homeowners with a single point of contact at their lending institution. It also gave the California Attorney General more power to investigate and prosecute financial fraud and to convene special grand juries to prosecute multi-county crimes instead of prosecuting a single crime county-by-county.[72][73] The Sacramento Beereported on one of the first cases of a homeowner using the bill to stop Bank of America from foreclosing on his home.[74]

After the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata (2011) declared California's prisons so overcrowded they inflicted cruel and unusual punishment, Harris fought federal court supervision, explaining "I have a client, and I don't get to choose my client."[8] After California failed to fully implement the court's order to reduce crowding, and was ordered to implement new parole programs, lawyers for Harris appealed the decision on grounds that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.[75]

Harris refused to take any position on criminal sentencing-reform initiatives Proposition 36 (2012) and Proposition 47 (2014), arguing it would be improper because her office prepares the ballot booklets.[8]Former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp considered her explanation "baloney."[8]

On August 24, 2012, the Los Angeles Times published an editorial calling on Harris to release Daniel Larsen from prison.[76] Larsen, who was sentenced to 28 years to life under California's three strikes laws for possession of a concealed weapon in 1999, was declared "actually innocent" by a federal judge in 2009 and ordered released. Evidence in favor of Larsen included that of a former chief of police and the actual owner of the knife. Larsen's original lawyer, who failed to call a single witness, has since been disbarred.[77] Larsen remained in prison because Harris's office objected to his release on the grounds that he missed the deadline to file his writ of habeas corpus. The California Innocence Project, which had taken up Larsen's case, said this amounted to a paperwork technicality. The Times editorial stated that if Harris was not willing to release Larsen, Governor Jerry Brown should pardon him. In March 2013, Larsen was released on bond with the case on appeal by order of Attorney General Harris "on technical grounds".[77] In September 2013, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the ruling, and on January 27, 2014, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Officedismissed the charge.[78]

In February 2014, Michelle-Lael Norsworthy, a transgender woman incarcerated at California's Mule Creek State Prison, filed a federal lawsuit based on the state's failure to provide her with what she argued was medically necessary sex reassignment surgery (SRS).[79] In April 2015, a federal judge ordered the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to provide Norsworthy with SRS, finding that prison officials had been "deliberately indifferent to her serious medical need."[80][81] California Attorney General Harris, representing CDCR, challenged the order in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.[82] Harris argued that "Norsworthy has been receiving hormone therapy for her gender dysphoria since 2000, and continues to receive hormone therapy and other forms of treatment" and that "there is no evidence that Norsworthy is in serious, immediate physical or emotional danger."[83]

In August 2015, while the state's appeal was pending, Norsworthy was released on parole, obviating the state's duty to provide her with inmate medical care.[84] AG Harris maintained that the parole review process was independent of Norsworthy's legal case against CDCR.[85] The appeals court, though, was unconvinced. "Before Norsworthy filed this suit", the court commented, "a panel of the parole board had on several prior occasions denied her parole. Four months after Norsworthy filed this suit in February 2014, however, the parole board decided to advance the date of her next parole hearing. … [On May 21] Norsworthy finally had a parole hearing, at which point a parole board panel approved her application." The court concluded that "these coincidences indicate that there is at least some chance that defendants influenced the parole process."[86]

Harris has prosecuted numerous financial crimes, such as predatory lending.[87] In 2011, while serving as Attorney General of California, she created the Mortgage Fraud Strike Force which had a mandate to eliminate mortgage foreclosure fraud. The task force has been criticized for not filing as many foreclosure cases as in states with smaller populations.[88]


Harris on August 18, 2011 announcing a lawsuit against entities involved in alleged mortgage fraud
In 2013, Harris did not prosecute Steve Mnuchin's bank OneWest despite evidence "suggestive of widespread misconduct" according to a leaked memo from the Department of Justice.[89] In 2017, Harris said that her office's decision to not prosecute Mnuchin was based on "following the facts and the evidence...like any other case."[90] In 2016, Mnuchin donated $2,000 to Harris's campaign,[91] making her the only 2016 Senate Democratic candidate to get cash from Mnuchin,[92] but as senator, Harris voted against the confirmation of Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury.[92][93] As a result of the donation, she has faced criticism for not prosecuting Mnuchin and OneWest Bank when she was Attorney General.[94]

In 2015, Harris defended convictions obtained by county prosecutors who had inserted a false confession into an interrogation transcript, committed perjury, and withheld evidence.[8] Federal appeals court Judge Alex Kozinski threw out the convictions, telling Harris's lawyers, "Talk to the attorney general and make sure she understands the gravity of the situation."[8]

In March 2015, a California superior courts judge ordered Harris to take over a criminal case after Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas was revealed to have illegally employed jailhouse informants and concealed evidence.[8] Harris refused, appealing the order and defending Rackauckas.[8]

Harris appealed the dismissal of an indictment when it was discovered a Kern County prosecutor perjured in submitting a falsified confession as court evidence. Harris asserted that prosecutorial perjury was not sufficient to demonstrate prosecutorial misconduct. In the case,[95] Harris argued that only abject physical brutality would warrant a finding of prosecutorial misconduct and the dismissal of an indictment, and that perjury was not sufficient.[96]

On February 12, 2015, Harris announced that she would start a new agency called the Bureau of Children's Justice. The bureau would work on issues such as foster care, the juvenile justice system, school truancy, and childhood trauma. Harris appointed special assistant attorney general Jill Habig to head the agency.[97]

In February 2016, it was revealed that the Attorney General would open a criminal investigation into the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's handling of the Mitrice Richardson case. The decision by Harris came about after her initial refusal to look into the case[98][99] resulted in public outcry and the Richardson's family and supporters submitting over 500 pages of evidence.[98] Mitrice Richardson was a 24-year-old African American woman who was released from the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department in the middle of the night without any means of fending for herself. Her body was later found in an isolated canyon, leaving the family with many unanswered questions.[100] On December 30, 2016, results of the criminal investigation into the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department handling of the Richardson case concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support criminal prosecution of anyone involved in the handling of the case.[101]

On October 6, 2016, Harris announced the arrest of Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer on felony charges of pimping a minor, pimping, and conspiracy to commit pimping. The arrest warrant alleged that 99% of Backpage's revenue was directly attributable to prostitution-related ads, many of which involved victims of sex trafficking, including children under the age of 18.[102]

On December 9, 2016, a superior court judge dismissed all charges in the complaint.[103] On December 23, 2016, Harris filed new charges against Ferrer and former Backpage owners Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin for pimping and money laundering.[104] In January 2017, Backpage announced that it was removing its adult section from all of its sites in the United States due what it claimed were many years of harassment and extralegal tactics.[105][106] The investigations continued after Harris became a senator, and On April 6, 2018 Backpage and affiliated sites were seized in an enforcement action by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, United States Department of Justice,[107] and Internal Revenue Service. Ferrer subsequently pleaded guilty to charges of facilitating prostitution and money laundering.[108]


Harris' campaign logo during the United States Senate election in California, 2016
Main article: United States Senate election in California, 2016
After Democratic United States Senator Barbara Boxer announced her intention to retire from the United States Senate at the end of her term in 2016, after which she would have been California's junior senator for 24 years, Harris was the first candidate to declare her intention to run for Boxer's Senate seat. Media outlets reported that Harris would run for Senate on the same day that Gavin Newsom, California's Lieutenant Governor and a close political ally of Harris, announced he would not seek to succeed Boxer.[109] Harris officially announced the launch of her campaign on January 13, 2015.[110]

After holding a flurry of fundraisers in both California and Washington, D.C., Harris was reported to have raised $2.5 million for her campaign.[111] In December, the National Journal released a story describing Harris' use of funds on hotels, the laying off of campaign staff and the inordinate totals, which had contributed to her money on hand being closer to that of another candidate, Loretta Sanchez, who had $1.6 million.[112][113]

Harris was a frontrunner from the beginning of her campaign. In January 2015, weeks after Harris announced her campaign, a survey by Public Policy Polling showed Harris leading by 41% to former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's 16%, who was seen as a potential candidate.[114] In May, a Field Poll was released, showing that although 58% of likely voters did not have a favored candidate, Harris was most preferred out of the field, with 19%.[115] October saw the release of a Field Poll with Harris at 30%, fellow Democratic candidate Loretta Sanchez in second place at 17%, the former having increased her support by 11% since the Field Poll in May despite being noted by The Sacramento Beeas not being active in campaigning since appearing at the California Democratic Party's convention.[116]

In late February 2016, the California Democratic Party voted at its state convention to endorse Harris, who received 78% of the vote, 18% more than the 60% needed to secure the endorsement.[117][118] The party endorsement did not secure any candidate a place in the general election, as all candidates would participate in one primary election in June, after which the top 2 candidates from any party would advance to the general election.[118] Harris participated in debates with the other major candidates for the seat, her front-runner status causing her to be at the center of discussion.[119][120] Governor Jerry Brown endorsed Harris on May 23.[121] Harris came in first place on primary day, June 7, with 40% of the votes, entering a runoff with fellow Democratic candidate Loretta Sanchez.[122] On July 19, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden endorsed Harris.[123]

In the June 2016 primary election, with results detailed at the county level, Harris won 48 of 58 counties. Harris won seven counties with more than 50% of the vote: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, and Sonoma. The highest percentage was San Francisco, with 70.4% of the vote.[124][125] She faced Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, also a Democrat, in the general election. This assured that the seat would stay in Democratic hands; it was the first time a Republican did not appear in a general election for the Senate since California began directly electing Senators in 1914.[126]

In the November 2016 election, Harris defeated Sanchez with 62 percent of the vote, carrying all but four counties.[127] Following her victory, Harris promised to protect immigrants from the policies of President-elect Donald Trump.[128]

Following her election to the United States Senate, Harris announced her intention to remain California's Attorney General through the end of 2016 and resign shortly before being sworn in as Senator on January 3, 2017.[129] Governor Jerry Brown announced his intention to nominate Congressman Xavier Becerra as her successor.[130]

On January 21, 2017, a day after President Trump was sworn into office, Harris called the message of Trump's inaugural address "dark" when speaking during the Women's March on Washington.[131] On January 28, following Trump signing the Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States executive order, which saw citizens from several countries with Muslim majorities barred from entering the US for 90 days, Harris was one of many to describe it as a "Muslim ban".[132][133]In early February, Harris spoke in opposition to Trump's cabinet picks Betsy DeVos, for Secretary of Education,[134] and Jeff Sessions, for United States Attorney General.[135] Later that month, in her first speech on the senate floor, Harris spent 12 minutes critiquing Trump's immigration policies.[136] In early March, Harris called on Attorney General Sessions to resign, after it was reported that Sessions spoke twice with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak.[137] On March 14, Harris claimed repealing the Affordable Care Act would send the message of health care's being a "privilege" rather than a "civil right".[138]

In a May 2017 interview, Harris criticized Republican representative Raul Labrador for saying that no one dies due to lack of access to health care.[139]

On June 7, 2017, Harris garnered media attention for her questioning of Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, over the role he played in the May 2017 firing of James Comey, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.[140] The prosecutorial nature of her questioning caused Senator John McCain, an ex officio member of the Intelligence Committee, and Senator Richard Burr, the committee chairman, to interrupt Harris and request that she be more respectful of the witness;[141] other Democrats on the committee pointed out that they had asked similarly tough questions, but had not been interrupted.[141] On June 13, Harris questioned Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, on the same topic;[142] Harris was again interrupted by McCain and Burr.[143]Sessions stated that Harris' mode of questioning "makes me nervous";[143] other Democratic members of the committee again pointed out that Harris was the only senator whose questioning was interrupted with an admonishment from the chairman.[143] Burr's singling out of Harris sparked suggestion in the news media that his behavior was sexist, with commentators arguing that Burr would not treat a male Senate colleague in a similar manner.[144] The website True Pundit suggested that treating Harris differently than other members of the Intelligence Committee is evidence of racism.[145] In addition, when CNN pundit Jason Miller described Harris as "hysterical", Kirsten Powers, who was taking part in the same on-air segment, told Miller that his use of the term to describe Harris was sexist, and that he would not describe male Senators in the same manner.[146]

Kamala Harris has been considered a top contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President.[147][148] She has publicly stated that she is "not ruling it out".[149] Her spending on Facebook advertising is unusually high, and targeted to reach voters outside California.[150][151]. In July 2018, it was announced that she would publish a memoir, another sign of a possible run.[152]

Kamala Harris was named as part of the "Hell-No Caucus" by Politico in 2018, along with Senators Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, all of whom overwhelmingly voted to reject Trump's nominees for administration jobs, including Rex Tillerson, Betsy De Vos, and Mike Pompeo; all were considered potential 2020 presidential contenders at this point in time.[153]


Source: Los Angeles Times

Since her election to the senate, Harris has maintained a 100% rating by the pro-choice Planned Parenthood Action Fund and a 0% rating by the pro-life National Right to Life Committee[157].

In May of 2018, Harris announced she would co-sponsor the Marijuana Justice Act, which Sen. Cory Booker introduced in August 2017. The legislation would eliminate marijuana's status as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substance Act. The move would also require federal courts to expunge the records of Americans who have prior marijuana convictions related to use or possession. She believes the move to decriminalize marijuana will prevent the Justice Department from enforcing laws that are “unjust and unfair.” [158][159]

Harris is opposed to the death penalty, but has said that she would review each case individually.[160] Her position was tested in April 2004, when SFPD Officer Isaac Espinoza was murdered in the Bayview district. Harris announced that she would not seek the death penalty for the man accused of his killing. The decision evoked protests from the San Francisco Police Officers Association, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and others.[8] Those who supported her decision not to seek the death penalty included San Francisco Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Sophie Maxwell, in whose district the murder occurred.[161] The jury found the convicted killer, David Hill, guilty of second-degree murder, although the prosecutor, Harry Dorfman, had sought a first-degree murder conviction.[162] The defense had argued that Hill thought Espinoza was a member of a rival gang, and that the murder was not premeditated. Hill was given the maximum sentence for the conviction, life without the possibility of parole.[162]

Harris's position against the death penalty was tested again in the case of Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant and alleged MS-13 gang member who was accused of murdering Tony Bologna and his sons Michael and Matthew.[32] On September 10, 2009, Harris announced she would seek life in prison without the possibility of parole rather than the death penalty in the Ramos case.[163]

Harris has expressed the belief that life without possibility of parole is a better, and more cost-effective, punishment.[164] According to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, the death penalty costs $137 million per year.[165] If the system were changed to life without possibility of parole, the annual costs would be approximately $12 million per year.[165] Harris noted that the resulting surplus could put 1,000 more police officers into service in San Francisco alone.[164]

When in 2014, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney declared capital punishment in California unconstitutional, Harris reviewed the case.[8]

In interviews with Matt Lauer on The Today Show and local KGO-TV, Harris argued for treating "habitual and chronic truancy" among children in elementary school as a crime committed by the parents of truant children. She argues that there is a direct connection between habitual truancy in elementary school and crime later in life.[166][167] She has received the endorsement of the California Federation of Teachers.[45]

During her time as San Francisco District Attorney, Harris created the Environmental Justice Unit in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office[168] and prosecuted several industries and individuals for pollution, most notably U-Haul, Alameda Publishing Corporation, and the Cosco Busan oil spill. She also advocated for strong enforcement of environmental protection laws.[169]

Harris has an F rating from the National Rifle Association for her consistent efforts supporting gun control.[170] While serving as district attorney in San Francisco, Harris, along with other district attorneys, filed an amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller, arguing that the Washington, D.C., gun law at issue did not violate the Second Amendment.[171] In her second term as district attorney, she said that getting guns off the streets was a priority.[172]

During her run for Senate, she was endorsed by former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, shot in Tucson in 2011. She was also endorsed by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.[173]

In response to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, Harris supported the call for more gun control. Believing that thoughts and prayers are inadequate answers to the shooting, she stated that "...we must also commit ourselves to action. Another moment of silence won't suffice."[174]

On August 30, 2017, Harris announced at a town hall in Oakland that she would co-sponsor fellow Senator Bernie Sanders' "Medicare for All" bill, supporting single-payer healthcare.[175]

Harris has expressed support for San Francisco's immigration policy of not inquiring about immigration status in the process of a criminal investigation.[176] Harris argues that it is important that immigrants be able to talk with law enforcement without fear.[177]

On October 25, 2017, during a news conference, Harris stated she would not support a spending bill until Congress addressed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in a way that clarified "what we are going to do to protect and take care of our DACA young people in this country."[178]

In a January 2018 interview, when asked by Hiram Soto about her ideal version of a bipartisan deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Harris stated the need to focus on comprehensive immigration reform and "pass a clean Dream Act."[179]

In July 2018, the Trump administration falsely accused Harris of "supporting the animals of MS-13."[180][181] Harris responded, "As a career prosecutor, I actually went after gangs and transnational criminal organizations. That's being a leader on public safety. What is not, is ripping babies from their mothers."[180] PolitiFact concluded, "We found no information showing Harris has supported or sympathized with MS-13. When asked, the White House provided no evidence to back up its reckless attack, which fits with a pattern of other baseless claims on the subject."[181]

In an April 6, 2017 statement, in response to the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, Harris charged President of Syria Bashar al-Assad with attacking Syrian children and the attack supported "the clear fact that President Assad is not only a ruthless dictator brutalizing his own people-he is a war criminal the international community cannot ignore." She called on President Trump to interact with Congress regarding his administration's "lack of clear objectives in Syria and articulate a detailed strategy and path forward in partnership with our allies."[182]

In February 2018, Harris was one of seventeen senators to sign a letter arguing against President Trump's having the legal authority to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea.[183]

On May 8, 2018, after President Trump announced the United States was withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Harris released a statement saying the decision "jeopardizes our national security and isolates us from our closest allies" while calling the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action "the best existing tool we have to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and avoid a disastrous military conflict in the Middle East."[184]


Personal Life


Kamala Harris in 2017 signing the guestbook at Yad Vashem as her husband looks on


Harris is married to California attorney Douglas Emhoff,[185] who was at one time partner-in-charge at Venable LLP's Los Angeles office.[186]They married on August 22, 2014, in Santa Barbara, California.[187] Harris's sister is Maya Harris, MSNBC political analyst, and her brother-in-law is Tony West, General Counsel of Uber and a former U.S. Justice Department senior official.[12][13] Harris has one niece, as well as two stepchildren, one in college and one in high school.[188]

  1. Jump up ^ Willon, Phil (November 9, 2016). "Kamala Harris is elected California's new U.S. senator". LA Times. Retrieved November 9, 2016.
  2. Jump up ^ KABC. "Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez finally concedes Senate race to Kamala Harris". abc7.com. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  3. Jump up ^ ": The New Face of Politics… An Interview with Kamala Harris". DesiClub. Archived from th

 

yureeka9

Rising Star
Platinum Member
Hmmm. Let’s see her bio (Wiki):

Kamala Devi Harris (/ˈkɑːmələ/, KAH-mə-lə; born October 20, 1964) is an American attorney and politician. She is a member of the Democratic Party. Harris has served as the juniorUnited States Senator from California since 2017. She had previously served as the 32nd Attorney General of California from 2011 to 2017.

Born in Oakland, California, Harris is a graduate of Howard University and University of California, Hastings College of the Law. In the 1990s, Harris worked in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and the City Attorney of San Francisco's office. In 2004, Harris was elected District Attorney of San Francisco.

Harris was elected California's Attorney General in 2010 and reelected in 2014. On November 8, 2016, she defeated Loretta Sanchezin the 2016 Senate election to succeed outgoing Senator Barbara Boxer, becoming California's third female U.S. Senator and the first of Jamaican or Indian descent.[1][2]

Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California to TamilIndian mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris (1938–2009) and Jamaicanfather, Donald Harris. Her mother was a breast cancer researcher, who emigrated from Chennai (then Madras), Tamil Nadu, India, in 1960,[3][4]and her father a Stanford University economics professor who emigrated from Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study in economics at University of California, Berkeley.[9] Her name, Kamala, comes from the Sanskrit word for lotus. She was extremely close to her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopalan, an Indian diplomat,[4][10] and as a child, she frequently visited her family in Besant Nagar, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.[11] She has one younger sister, Maya.[12][13]

The family lived in Berkeley, California, where both of Harris' parents attended graduate school.[14] Harris' parents divorced when she was 7 and her mother was granted custody of the children by court-ordered settlement.[14] After the divorce, her mother moved with the children to Montreal, Québec, Canada, where Shyamala took a position doing research at the Jewish General Hospital and teaching at McGill University.[15][16]

After graduating from Montreal's Westmount High School in Quebec, Harris attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in political science and economics.[17][18] At Howard, Harris was elected to the liberal arts student council as freshman class representative, was a member of the debate team, and joined the Alpha Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.[17]

Harris then returned to California, earning her Juris Doctor (J.D.) from University of California, Hastings College of the Law, in 1989.[19][8] She was admitted to the State Bar of California in 1990.[20]

Main article: Electoral history of Kamala Harris

Harris (back, second from the left) celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Harris served as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California, from 1990 to 1998. Harris says she sought a career in law enforcement because she wanted to be "at the table where decisions are made."[8] In 1993, she started dating California Speaker of the Assembly Willie Brown, who introduced her to many powerful individuals in the California and Sacramento political and campaign management establishment.[21] In 2000, San Francisco's elected City Attorney, Louise Renne, recruited Harris to join her office, where she was chief of the Community and Neighborhood Division, which oversees civil code enforcement matters.[22]

After the Fajitagate scandal, Harris defeated two-term incumbent Terence Hallinan in the 2003 election to become District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco.[23]

In April 2004, San Francisco Police Department Officer Isaac Espinoza was shot and killed in the line of duty.[8] Three days later D.A. Harris announced she would not seek the death penalty, infuriating the San Francisco Police Officers Association.[8] During Officer Espinoza's funeral at St. Mary's Cathedral, U.S. Senator and former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein rose to the pulpit and called on Harris, who was sitting in the front pew, to secure the death penalty, prompting a standing ovation from the 2,000 uniformed police officers in attendance.[8] Harris still refused.[8] Officer Espinoza's killer was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison.[8] Shortly thereafter, Harris demoted veteran career prosecutor Paul Cummins, the chief assistant to her predecessor who former officer Joe O'Sullivan described as "the most ethical prosecutor I've met", from the 80-person felony prosecution unit to Harris's former position in the DA's office.[24]

As D.A., Harris started a program that gives first-time drug dealers the chance to earn a high school diploma and find employment.[8] Over eight years, the program produced fewer than 300 graduates, but achieved a very low recidivism rate.[8] Harris was re-elected in 2007 when she ran unopposed.[25]

In 2009, Harris wrote Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer,[26] in which she looked at criminal justice from an economic perspective and attempted to reduce temptation and access for criminals.[27] The book discusses a series of "myths" surrounding the criminal justice system and presents proposals to reduce and prevent crime.[27] Recognized by The Los Angeles Daily Journal as one of the top 100 lawyers in California, Harris served on the board of the California District Attorney's Association and was vice president of the National District Attorneys Association.[28]

She has been outspoken on the need for innovation in public safety, particularly with respect to reducing the recidivism rate in San Francisco.[29] One such program, "Back on Track", was signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as a model program for the state.[30][31]Initially, there were issues with removing illegal immigrants from the program, such as an incident involving Alexander Izaguirre, who was later arrested for assault.[32] The program was revised to address that concern, barring anyone who could not legally be employed in the United States.[33] Harris also protected informants with the Nuestra Familiaprison gang who were engaged in illegal activities including drug trafficking and weapon possession.[34]

While Harris was the San Francisco District Attorney, the overall felonyconviction rate rose from 52% in 2003 to 67% in 2006, the highest in a decade; there was an 85% conviction rate for homicides, and convictions of drug dealers increased from 56% in 2003 to 74% in 2006.[35] While these statistics represent only trial convictions, Harris also closed many cases via plea bargains.[36] When she took office, she took a special interest in clearing part of the murder caseload from the previous administration. Harris claimed that the records from that administration were less than optimal, and worked to get convictions on what she could. That meant that out of the 73 homicide cases backlogged, 32 cases took deals for lesser charges such as manslaughter or took pleas to other crimes such as assault or burglary while the murder charges were dismissed.[37]


Harris holding a press conference with law enforcement agents
However, the San Francisco DA's incarceration rates were among the lowest in the entire state of California—fully ten times lower than in San Diego County, for example. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "roughly 4 of every 100 arrests resulted in prison terms in San Francisco, compared with 12.8 out of 100 in Alameda County, 14.4 of 100 in Sacramento County, 21 of 100 in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, 26.6 of 100 in Fresno County, 38.7 of 100 in Los Angeles County and 41 of 100 in San Diego County."[38] Police also noted that lenient sentencing from San Francisco judges also played a role in this.[38]

While officers within the SFPD credited Harris with tightening loopholes in bail and drug programs that defendants had exploited in the past, they also accused her of being too deliberate in her prosecution of murder suspects.[39] Additionally, in 2009, San Francisco prosecutors won a lower percentage of their felony jury trials than their counterparts at district attorneys' offices covering the 10 largest cities in California, according to data on case outcomes compiled by officials at the San Francisco Superior Court as well as by other county courts and prosecutors. (Officials in Sacramento, the sixth-largest city in California, did not provide data.) Harris's at-trial felony conviction rate that year was 76%, down 12 points from the previous year. By contrast, the then-most recent recorded statewide average was 83%, according to statistics from the California Judicial Council.[40] In a small sample, a report computed that the conviction rate for felony trials in San Francisco County in the first three months of 2010 was just 53%.[40] San Francisco has historically had one of the lowest conviction rates in the state; the county is known for a defendant-friendly jury pool.[41][40]

In 2012, Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo ruled that San Francisco District Attorney Harris' office violated defendants' rights by hiding damaging information about a police crime lab technician, and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings.[42]

As San Francisco District Attorney, Harris created a special Hate Crimes Unit, focusing on hate crimes against LGBT children and teens in schools. She convened a national conference to confront the "gay-transgenderpanic defense", which has been used to justify violent hate crimes.[43]Harris supports same-sex marriage in California and opposed both Proposition 22 and Proposition 8.[44]

In 2004, The National Urban League honored Harris as a "Woman of Power"; in 2005, she received the Thurgood Marshall Award from the National Black Prosecutors Association. In her campaign for California Attorney General, she received the endorsements of numerous groups, including EMILY's List; California Legislative Black Caucus; Asian American Action Fund; Black Women Organized for Political Action; the National Women's Political Caucus; Mexican American Bar Association; and South Asians for Opportunity.[45]

Main article: California Attorney General election, 2010

Harris being sworn-in as Attorney General
On November 12, 2008, Harris announced her candidacy for California Attorney General. Both of California's United States Senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, endorsed Harris during the Democratic Party primary.[46] In the June 8, 2010, primary, she was nominated with 33.6% of the vote. Her closest competitors had 15.6% and 15.5% respectively.[47][48]

In her campaign for California Attorney General, Harris received the endorsements of United Farm Workers cofounder Dolores Huerta, United Educators of San Francisco, and San Francisco Firefighters Local 798.[45]She also received the endorsement of Antonio Villaraigosa, Mayor of Los Angeles.[49] In the general election, she faced Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley. On election night, November 2, 2010, Cooley prematurely declared victory, but many ballots remained uncounted. On November 24, as the count advanced, Harris was leading by more than 55,000 votes, and Cooley conceded.[50] On January 3, 2011, Harris became the first female,[28] Jamaican American,[49][51] and Indian American attorney general in California.[52][53]


Harris speaking at a US Department of Justice event
In 2012, she sent a letter to 100 mobile-app developers, asking them to comply with California law with respect to privacy issues.[54] If any developer of an application that could be used by a Californian does not display a privacy policy statement when the application is installed, California law is broken, with a possible fine $2500 for every download. The law affects any developer anywhere in the world if the app is used by a Californian.[55]

At the 2012 Democratic National Convention Harris gave a prime-time speech attacking Mitt Romney.[8] During the second Obama administration, Harris was mentioned as a possible nominee for a seat on the United States Supreme Court if a seat on that court became vacant.[56] In February 2016, The New York Times identified her as a potential US Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.[57]

Main article: California Attorney General election, 2014

Harris right, with her sister, Maya, at San Francisco City Hall in February 2014.
Harris announced her intention to run for re-election in February 2014 and filed paperwork to run on February 12. According to the office of California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, Harris had raised the money for her campaign during the previous year in 2013.[58] On August 13, 2014, Harris announced her endorsement of Betty Yeefor California State Controller, calling her one of the state's "most knowledgeable and responsible money managers," and said she was proud to endorse her. Yee, in return, sang Harris's praises and called her an "outstanding elected leader."[59]Harris also endorsed Bonnie Dumanis[60] and Sandra Fluke.[61] Harris herself was endorsed by The Sacramento Bee,[62] Los Angeles Daily News,[63] and The Los Angeles Times.[64]

On November 4, 2014, Harris was re-elected against Republican Ronald Gold.[65]

In September 2014, when US Attorney General Eric Holder announced his intention to step down, it was speculated that Harris might be a potential candidate as the next US Attorney General.[66] Days after Holder's resignation, Harris addressed the speculation in a statement declining any intent to take the office and asserting that she was staying in her position as Attorney General of California.[67] Two months later, in November 2014, President Barack Obama nominated Loretta Lynch to succeed Holder.[68] On November 10, Harris issued a statement regarding the nomination that approved of Obama's decision, praised Lynch, and reaffirmed her choice to remain working with the California Department of Justice.[69]


Harris' official portrait as Attorney General
When Harris took office, California was still reeling from the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis. Harris participated in the National Mortgage Settlement against five banks: Ally Financial, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citibank, and Chase. She originally walked off the talks because she believed the deal was too lenient. She later rejoined the talks, securing $12 billion of debt reduction for the state's homeowners and $26 billion overall.[70] Other parts of the funding would go to state housing counseling services and legal help for struggling homeowners and forgiving the debt of over 23,000 homeowners who agreed to sell their homes for less than the mortgage loan.[71]

Later, she introduced the California Homeowner's Bill of Rights in the California State Legislature, a package of several bills that would give homeowners more "options when fighting to keep their home". The Bill, which took effect on January 1, 2013, banned the practices of "dual-tracking" (processing a modification and foreclosure at the same time) and robo-signing, and provided homeowners with a single point of contact at their lending institution. It also gave the California Attorney General more power to investigate and prosecute financial fraud and to convene special grand juries to prosecute multi-county crimes instead of prosecuting a single crime county-by-county.[72][73] The Sacramento Beereported on one of the first cases of a homeowner using the bill to stop Bank of America from foreclosing on his home.[74]

After the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata (2011) declared California's prisons so overcrowded they inflicted cruel and unusual punishment, Harris fought federal court supervision, explaining "I have a client, and I don't get to choose my client."[8] After California failed to fully implement the court's order to reduce crowding, and was ordered to implement new parole programs, lawyers for Harris appealed the decision on grounds that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.[75]

Harris refused to take any position on criminal sentencing-reform initiatives Proposition 36 (2012) and Proposition 47 (2014), arguing it would be improper because her office prepares the ballot booklets.[8]Former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp considered her explanation "baloney."[8]

On August 24, 2012, the Los Angeles Times published an editorial calling on Harris to release Daniel Larsen from prison.[76] Larsen, who was sentenced to 28 years to life under California's three strikes laws for possession of a concealed weapon in 1999, was declared "actually innocent" by a federal judge in 2009 and ordered released. Evidence in favor of Larsen included that of a former chief of police and the actual owner of the knife. Larsen's original lawyer, who failed to call a single witness, has since been disbarred.[77] Larsen remained in prison because Harris's office objected to his release on the grounds that he missed the deadline to file his writ of habeas corpus. The California Innocence Project, which had taken up Larsen's case, said this amounted to a paperwork technicality. The Times editorial stated that if Harris was not willing to release Larsen, Governor Jerry Brown should pardon him. In March 2013, Larsen was released on bond with the case on appeal by order of Attorney General Harris "on technical grounds".[77] In September 2013, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the ruling, and on January 27, 2014, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Officedismissed the charge.[78]

In February 2014, Michelle-Lael Norsworthy, a transgender woman incarcerated at California's Mule Creek State Prison, filed a federal lawsuit based on the state's failure to provide her with what she argued was medically necessary sex reassignment surgery (SRS).[79] In April 2015, a federal judge ordered the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to provide Norsworthy with SRS, finding that prison officials had been "deliberately indifferent to her serious medical need."[80][81] California Attorney General Harris, representing CDCR, challenged the order in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.[82] Harris argued that "Norsworthy has been receiving hormone therapy for her gender dysphoria since 2000, and continues to receive hormone therapy and other forms of treatment" and that "there is no evidence that Norsworthy is in serious, immediate physical or emotional danger."[83]

In August 2015, while the state's appeal was pending, Norsworthy was released on parole, obviating the state's duty to provide her with inmate medical care.[84] AG Harris maintained that the parole review process was independent of Norsworthy's legal case against CDCR.[85] The appeals court, though, was unconvinced. "Before Norsworthy filed this suit", the court commented, "a panel of the parole board had on several prior occasions denied her parole. Four months after Norsworthy filed this suit in February 2014, however, the parole board decided to advance the date of her next parole hearing. … [On May 21] Norsworthy finally had a parole hearing, at which point a parole board panel approved her application." The court concluded that "these coincidences indicate that there is at least some chance that defendants influenced the parole process."[86]

Harris has prosecuted numerous financial crimes, such as predatory lending.[87] In 2011, while serving as Attorney General of California, she created the Mortgage Fraud Strike Force which had a mandate to eliminate mortgage foreclosure fraud. The task force has been criticized for not filing as many foreclosure cases as in states with smaller populations.[88]


Harris on August 18, 2011 announcing a lawsuit against entities involved in alleged mortgage fraud
In 2013, Harris did not prosecute Steve Mnuchin's bank OneWest despite evidence "suggestive of widespread misconduct" according to a leaked memo from the Department of Justice.[89] In 2017, Harris said that her office's decision to not prosecute Mnuchin was based on "following the facts and the evidence...like any other case."[90] In 2016, Mnuchin donated $2,000 to Harris's campaign,[91] making her the only 2016 Senate Democratic candidate to get cash from Mnuchin,[92] but as senator, Harris voted against the confirmation of Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury.[92][93] As a result of the donation, she has faced criticism for not prosecuting Mnuchin and OneWest Bank when she was Attorney General.[94]

In 2015, Harris defended convictions obtained by county prosecutors who had inserted a false confession into an interrogation transcript, committed perjury, and withheld evidence.[8] Federal appeals court Judge Alex Kozinski threw out the convictions, telling Harris's lawyers, "Talk to the attorney general and make sure she understands the gravity of the situation."[8]

In March 2015, a California superior courts judge ordered Harris to take over a criminal case after Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas was revealed to have illegally employed jailhouse informants and concealed evidence.[8] Harris refused, appealing the order and defending Rackauckas.[8]

Harris appealed the dismissal of an indictment when it was discovered a Kern County prosecutor perjured in submitting a falsified confession as court evidence. Harris asserted that prosecutorial perjury was not sufficient to demonstrate prosecutorial misconduct. In the case,[95] Harris argued that only abject physical brutality would warrant a finding of prosecutorial misconduct and the dismissal of an indictment, and that perjury was not sufficient.[96]

On February 12, 2015, Harris announced that she would start a new agency called the Bureau of Children's Justice. The bureau would work on issues such as foster care, the juvenile justice system, school truancy, and childhood trauma. Harris appointed special assistant attorney general Jill Habig to head the agency.[97]

In February 2016, it was revealed that the Attorney General would open a criminal investigation into the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's handling of the Mitrice Richardson case. The decision by Harris came about after her initial refusal to look into the case[98][99] resulted in public outcry and the Richardson's family and supporters submitting over 500 pages of evidence.[98] Mitrice Richardson was a 24-year-old African American woman who was released from the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department in the middle of the night without any means of fending for herself. Her body was later found in an isolated canyon, leaving the family with many unanswered questions.[100] On December 30, 2016, results of the criminal investigation into the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department handling of the Richardson case concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support criminal prosecution of anyone involved in the handling of the case.[101]

On October 6, 2016, Harris announced the arrest of Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer on felony charges of pimping a minor, pimping, and conspiracy to commit pimping. The arrest warrant alleged that 99% of Backpage's revenue was directly attributable to prostitution-related ads, many of which involved victims of sex trafficking, including children under the age of 18.[102]

On December 9, 2016, a superior court judge dismissed all charges in the complaint.[103] On December 23, 2016, Harris filed new charges against Ferrer and former Backpage owners Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin for pimping and money laundering.[104] In January 2017, Backpage announced that it was removing its adult section from all of its sites in the United States due what it claimed were many years of harassment and extralegal tactics.[105][106] The investigations continued after Harris became a senator, and On April 6, 2018 Backpage and affiliated sites were seized in an enforcement action by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, United States Department of Justice,[107] and Internal Revenue Service. Ferrer subsequently pleaded guilty to charges of facilitating prostitution and money laundering.[108]


Harris' campaign logo during the United States Senate election in California, 2016
Main article: United States Senate election in California, 2016
After Democratic United States Senator Barbara Boxer announced her intention to retire from the United States Senate at the end of her term in 2016, after which she would have been California's junior senator for 24 years, Harris was the first candidate to declare her intention to run for Boxer's Senate seat. Media outlets reported that Harris would run for Senate on the same day that Gavin Newsom, California's Lieutenant Governor and a close political ally of Harris, announced he would not seek to succeed Boxer.[109] Harris officially announced the launch of her campaign on January 13, 2015.[110]

After holding a flurry of fundraisers in both California and Washington, D.C., Harris was reported to have raised $2.5 million for her campaign.[111] In December, the National Journal released a story describing Harris' use of funds on hotels, the laying off of campaign staff and the inordinate totals, which had contributed to her money on hand being closer to that of another candidate, Loretta Sanchez, who had $1.6 million.[112][113]

Harris was a frontrunner from the beginning of her campaign. In January 2015, weeks after Harris announced her campaign, a survey by Public Policy Polling showed Harris leading by 41% to former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's 16%, who was seen as a potential candidate.[114] In May, a Field Poll was released, showing that although 58% of likely voters did not have a favored candidate, Harris was most preferred out of the field, with 19%.[115] October saw the release of a Field Poll with Harris at 30%, fellow Democratic candidate Loretta Sanchez in second place at 17%, the former having increased her support by 11% since the Field Poll in May despite being noted by The Sacramento Beeas not being active in campaigning since appearing at the California Democratic Party's convention.[116]

In late February 2016, the California Democratic Party voted at its state convention to endorse Harris, who received 78% of the vote, 18% more than the 60% needed to secure the endorsement.[117][118] The party endorsement did not secure any candidate a place in the general election, as all candidates would participate in one primary election in June, after which the top 2 candidates from any party would advance to the general election.[118] Harris participated in debates with the other major candidates for the seat, her front-runner status causing her to be at the center of discussion.[119][120] Governor Jerry Brown endorsed Harris on May 23.[121] Harris came in first place on primary day, June 7, with 40% of the votes, entering a runoff with fellow Democratic candidate Loretta Sanchez.[122] On July 19, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden endorsed Harris.[123]

In the June 2016 primary election, with results detailed at the county level, Harris won 48 of 58 counties. Harris won seven counties with more than 50% of the vote: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, and Sonoma. The highest percentage was San Francisco, with 70.4% of the vote.[124][125] She faced Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, also a Democrat, in the general election. This assured that the seat would stay in Democratic hands; it was the first time a Republican did not appear in a general election for the Senate since California began directly electing Senators in 1914.[126]

In the November 2016 election, Harris defeated Sanchez with 62 percent of the vote, carrying all but four counties.[127] Following her victory, Harris promised to protect immigrants from the policies of President-elect Donald Trump.[128]

Following her election to the United States Senate, Harris announced her intention to remain California's Attorney General through the end of 2016 and resign shortly before being sworn in as Senator on January 3, 2017.[129] Governor Jerry Brown announced his intention to nominate Congressman Xavier Becerra as her successor.[130]

On January 21, 2017, a day after President Trump was sworn into office, Harris called the message of Trump's inaugural address "dark" when speaking during the Women's March on Washington.[131] On January 28, following Trump signing the Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States executive order, which saw citizens from several countries with Muslim majorities barred from entering the US for 90 days, Harris was one of many to describe it as a "Muslim ban".[132][133]In early February, Harris spoke in opposition to Trump's cabinet picks Betsy DeVos, for Secretary of Education,[134] and Jeff Sessions, for United States Attorney General.[135] Later that month, in her first speech on the senate floor, Harris spent 12 minutes critiquing Trump's immigration policies.[136] In early March, Harris called on Attorney General Sessions to resign, after it was reported that Sessions spoke twice with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak.[137] On March 14, Harris claimed repealing the Affordable Care Act would send the message of health care's being a "privilege" rather than a "civil right".[138]

In a May 2017 interview, Harris criticized Republican representative Raul Labrador for saying that no one dies due to lack of access to health care.[139]

On June 7, 2017, Harris garnered media attention for her questioning of Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, over the role he played in the May 2017 firing of James Comey, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.[140] The prosecutorial nature of her questioning caused Senator John McCain, an ex officio member of the Intelligence Committee, and Senator Richard Burr, the committee chairman, to interrupt Harris and request that she be more respectful of the witness;[141] other Democrats on the committee pointed out that they had asked similarly tough questions, but had not been interrupted.[141] On June 13, Harris questioned Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, on the same topic;[142] Harris was again interrupted by McCain and Burr.[143]Sessions stated that Harris' mode of questioning "makes me nervous";[143] other Democratic members of the committee again pointed out that Harris was the only senator whose questioning was interrupted with an admonishment from the chairman.[143] Burr's singling out of Harris sparked suggestion in the news media that his behavior was sexist, with commentators arguing that Burr would not treat a male Senate colleague in a similar manner.[144] The website True Pundit suggested that treating Harris differently than other members of the Intelligence Committee is evidence of racism.[145] In addition, when CNN pundit Jason Miller described Harris as "hysterical", Kirsten Powers, who was taking part in the same on-air segment, told Miller that his use of the term to describe Harris was sexist, and that he would not describe male Senators in the same manner.[146]

Kamala Harris has been considered a top contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President.[147][148] She has publicly stated that she is "not ruling it out".[149] Her spending on Facebook advertising is unusually high, and targeted to reach voters outside California.[150][151]. In July 2018, it was announced that she would publish a memoir, another sign of a possible run.[152]

Kamala Harris was named as part of the "Hell-No Caucus" by Politico in 2018, along with Senators Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, all of whom overwhelmingly voted to reject Trump's nominees for administration jobs, including Rex Tillerson, Betsy De Vos, and Mike Pompeo; all were considered potential 2020 presidential contenders at this point in time.[153]


Source: Los Angeles Times

Since her election to the senate, Harris has maintained a 100% rating by the pro-choice Planned Parenthood Action Fund and a 0% rating by the pro-life National Right to Life Committee[157].

In May of 2018, Harris announced she would co-sponsor the Marijuana Justice Act, which Sen. Cory Booker introduced in August 2017. The legislation would eliminate marijuana's status as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substance Act. The move would also require federal courts to expunge the records of Americans who have prior marijuana convictions related to use or possession. She believes the move to decriminalize marijuana will prevent the Justice Department from enforcing laws that are “unjust and unfair.” [158][159]

Harris is opposed to the death penalty, but has said that she would review each case individually.[160] Her position was tested in April 2004, when SFPD Officer Isaac Espinoza was murdered in the Bayview district. Harris announced that she would not seek the death penalty for the man accused of his killing. The decision evoked protests from the San Francisco Police Officers Association, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and others.[8] Those who supported her decision not to seek the death penalty included San Francisco Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Sophie Maxwell, in whose district the murder occurred.[161] The jury found the convicted killer, David Hill, guilty of second-degree murder, although the prosecutor, Harry Dorfman, had sought a first-degree murder conviction.[162] The defense had argued that Hill thought Espinoza was a member of a rival gang, and that the murder was not premeditated. Hill was given the maximum sentence for the conviction, life without the possibility of parole.[162]

Harris's position against the death penalty was tested again in the case of Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant and alleged MS-13 gang member who was accused of murdering Tony Bologna and his sons Michael and Matthew.[32] On September 10, 2009, Harris announced she would seek life in prison without the possibility of parole rather than the death penalty in the Ramos case.[163]

Harris has expressed the belief that life without possibility of parole is a better, and more cost-effective, punishment.[164] According to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, the death penalty costs $137 million per year.[165] If the system were changed to life without possibility of parole, the annual costs would be approximately $12 million per year.[165] Harris noted that the resulting surplus could put 1,000 more police officers into service in San Francisco alone.[164]

When in 2014, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney declared capital punishment in California unconstitutional, Harris reviewed the case.[8]

In interviews with Matt Lauer on The Today Show and local KGO-TV, Harris argued for treating "habitual and chronic truancy" among children in elementary school as a crime committed by the parents of truant children. She argues that there is a direct connection between habitual truancy in elementary school and crime later in life.[166][167] She has received the endorsement of the California Federation of Teachers.[45]

During her time as San Francisco District Attorney, Harris created the Environmental Justice Unit in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office[168] and prosecuted several industries and individuals for pollution, most notably U-Haul, Alameda Publishing Corporation, and the Cosco Busan oil spill. She also advocated for strong enforcement of environmental protection laws.[169]

Harris has an F rating from the National Rifle Association for her consistent efforts supporting gun control.[170] While serving as district attorney in San Francisco, Harris, along with other district attorneys, filed an amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller, arguing that the Washington, D.C., gun law at issue did not violate the Second Amendment.[171] In her second term as district attorney, she said that getting guns off the streets was a priority.[172]

During her run for Senate, she was endorsed by former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, shot in Tucson in 2011. She was also endorsed by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.[173]

In response to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, Harris supported the call for more gun control. Believing that thoughts and prayers are inadequate answers to the shooting, she stated that "...we must also commit ourselves to action. Another moment of silence won't suffice."[174]

On August 30, 2017, Harris announced at a town hall in Oakland that she would co-sponsor fellow Senator Bernie Sanders' "Medicare for All" bill, supporting single-payer healthcare.[175]

Harris has expressed support for San Francisco's immigration policy of not inquiring about immigration status in the process of a criminal investigation.[176] Harris argues that it is important that immigrants be able to talk with law enforcement without fear.[177]

On October 25, 2017, during a news conference, Harris stated she would not support a spending bill until Congress addressed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in a way that clarified "what we are going to do to protect and take care of our DACA young people in this country."[178]

In a January 2018 interview, when asked by Hiram Soto about her ideal version of a bipartisan deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Harris stated the need to focus on comprehensive immigration reform and "pass a clean Dream Act."[179]

In July 2018, the Trump administration falsely accused Harris of "supporting the animals of MS-13."[180][181] Harris responded, "As a career prosecutor, I actually went after gangs and transnational criminal organizations. That's being a leader on public safety. What is not, is ripping babies from their mothers."[180] PolitiFact concluded, "We found no information showing Harris has supported or sympathized with MS-13. When asked, the White House provided no evidence to back up its reckless attack, which fits with a pattern of other baseless claims on the subject."[181]

In an April 6, 2017 statement, in response to the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, Harris charged President of Syria Bashar al-Assad with attacking Syrian children and the attack supported "the clear fact that President Assad is not only a ruthless dictator brutalizing his own people-he is a war criminal the international community cannot ignore." She called on President Trump to interact with Congress regarding his administration's "lack of clear objectives in Syria and articulate a detailed strategy and path forward in partnership with our allies."[182]

In February 2018, Harris was one of seventeen senators to sign a letter arguing against President Trump's having the legal authority to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea.[183]

On May 8, 2018, after President Trump announced the United States was withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Harris released a statement saying the decision "jeopardizes our national security and isolates us from our closest allies" while calling the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action "the best existing tool we have to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and avoid a disastrous military conflict in the Middle East."[184]


Personal Life


Kamala Harris in 2017 signing the guestbook at Yad Vashem as her husband looks on


Harris is married to California attorney Douglas Emhoff,[185] who was at one time partner-in-charge at Venable LLP's Los Angeles office.[186]They married on August 22, 2014, in Santa Barbara, California.[187] Harris's sister is Maya Harris, MSNBC political analyst, and her brother-in-law is Tony West, General Counsel of Uber and a former U.S. Justice Department senior official.[12][13] Harris has one niece, as well as two stepchildren, one in college and one in high school.[188]

  1. Jump up ^ Willon, Phil (November 9, 2016). "Kamala Harris is elected California's new U.S. senator". LA Times. Retrieved November 9, 2016.
  2. Jump up ^ KABC. "Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez finally concedes Senate race to Kamala Harris". abc7.com. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  3. Jump up ^ ": The New Face of Politics… An Interview with Kamala Harris". DesiClub. Archived from th

If steam starts to build on the possibility of her being a presidential candidate I'm sure I'll read all of that with an open mind. Right now I'm just wondering what she has done in her capacity as a democratic public servant, SPECIFICALLY for black people. I'll start there. For me that's the litmus test for black politicians. Particularly those that are layin up with peckerwoods.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
If steam starts to build on the possibility of her being a presidential candidate I'm sure I'll read all of that with an open mind. Right now I'm just wondering what she has done in her capacity as a democratic public servant, SPECIFICALLY for black people. I'll start there. For me that's the litmus test for black politicians. Particularly those that are layin up with peckerwoods.

LOL. Your comment above at Post#3 peaked my interest, hence, “The Colin” post. She has a rather curious background.
 

COINTELPRO

Transnational Member
Registered


This seems to be a common pattern, where they link them with whites in some way behind the scenes.
 

COINTELPRO

Transnational Member
Registered
Any black woman married to a cracka in this country automatically gets the side eye from me...



This seems to be a common pattern (Tariq, Boyce, Cynthia G, MKBHD), where they have a link with whites in some way behind the scenes. To establish legitimacy, they will talk about racism but setup targeted attacks against real pro blacks like Umar Johnson. Their views, subscribers and money they have is in the millions, meanwhile I am shadow banned.

You might be forced into an interracial relationship with your oppressor if your peers are doing it. He might have been holding out for a good black women which never materialize
 
Last edited:

yureeka9

Rising Star
Platinum Member


This seems to be a common pattern (Tariq, Boyce, Cynthia G, MKBHD), where they link them with whites in some way behind the scenes to establish legitimacy. They will talk about racism but setup targeted attacks against real pro blacks like Umar Johnson. Their views, subscribers and money they have is in the millions, meanwhile I am shadow banned.

You might be forced into an interracial relationship with your oppressor if your peers are doing it. He might have been holding out for a good black women which never materialize

Then dammit, its either time to go it alone or get someone else of color! Sleeping with the enemy is not an option if you're holding yourself out as a black liberator.
 

COINTELPRO

Transnational Member
Registered


I am not endorsing or promoting her. This sounds like a good idea. It is really income equalization, where we treat everybody that goes to work the same to a certain income level. Some people are able to get a union to earn $30 an hour and some workers do not have the capacity. We have some aspects of it with Obamacare.

I am really upset because this should have been done rather than doing Obamacare (subsidy is $600 per month!), than letting the private health insurance market fix its problems. Many of the problems can be fixed through the private sector with some modest reforms.
 

MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator
Kamala Harris said she’ll take the holiday break to decide if she will run for president in 2020


 

MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator
BREAKING: Just hours away from Trump's primetime speech about the border, Kamala Harris went on The View and called him out with a brutal takedown.


 

dasmybikepunk

Wait for it.....
OG Investor
FUCK THIS BITCH IF YOU A REAL BLACK PERSON IN AMERICA AND YOU GIVE THIS BED WENCH, BLACK HATING, TOOL OF WHITE POWER YOU BETTER BE READY FOR WORSE THAN TRUMP...YES WORSE, THIS
BITCH WILL FUCK BLACK PEOPLE OVER WITH A SMILE!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator
Former California Attorney General and now U. S. Senator Kamala Harris (right) and her sister Maya (left) at San Francisco City Hall.
50830664_2301833710093150_1252039823561064448_n.jpg
tenor.gif




JosephSALUTE

A SALUTE TO YOU BLACK WOMAN!!!

I see you! I respect you! I stand with you!

Opinion

Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’

The senator was often on the wrong side of history when she served as California’s attorney general.

  • merlin_144484056_02b13aa0-c3f7-4dfa-9540-67070837bc30-jumbo.jpg
Before she was a senator, Kamala Harris was an attorney general and district attorney who acted in ways that could hardly be described as "progressive," Lara Bazelon writes.CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

By Lara Bazelon
Jan. 17, 2019


SAN FRANCISCO — With the growing recognition that prosecutors hold the keys to a fairer criminal justice system, the term “progressive prosecutor” has almost become trendy. This is how Senator Kamala Harris of California, a likely presidential candidate and a former prosecutor, describes herself.

But she’s not.

Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.

Consider her record as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011. Ms. Harris was criticized in 2010 for withholding information about a police laboratory technician who had been accused of “intentionally sabotaging” her work and stealing drugs from the lab. After a memo surfaced showing that Ms. Harris’s deputies knew about the technician’s wrongdoing and recent conviction, but failed to alert defense lawyers, a judge condemned Ms. Harris’s indifference to the systemic violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights.

Ms. Harris contested the ruling by arguing that the judge, whose husband was a defense attorney and had spoken publicly about the importance of disclosing evidence, had a conflict of interest. Ms. Harris lost. More than 600 cases handled by the corrupt technician were dismissed.


Ms. Harris also championed state legislation under which parents whose children were found to be habitually truant in elementary school could be prosecuted, despite concerns that it would disproportionately affect low-income people of color.

Ms. Harris was similarly regressive as the state’s attorney general. When a federal judge in Orange County ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional in 2014, Ms. Harris appealed. In a public statement, she made the bizarre argument that the decision “undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants.” (The approximately 740 men and women awaiting execution in California might disagree).

In 2014, she declined to take a position on Proposition 47, a ballot initiative approved by voters, that reduced certain low-level felonies to misdemeanors. She laughed that year when a reporter asked if she would support the legalization of marijuana for recreational use. Ms. Harris finally reversed course in 2018, long after public opinion had shifted on the topic.

In 2015, she opposed a bill requiring her office to investigate shootings involving officers. And she refused to support statewide standards regulating the use of body-worn cameras by police officers. For this, she incurred criticism from an array of left-leaning reformers, including Democratic state senators, the A.C.L.U. and San Francisco’s elected public defender. The activist Phelicia Jones, who had supported Ms. Harris for years, asked, “How many more people need to die before she steps in?


Worst of all, though, is Ms. Harris’s record in wrongful conviction cases. Consider George Gage, an electrician with no criminal record who was charged in 1999 with sexually abusing his stepdaughter, who reported the allegations years later. The case largely hinged on the stepdaughter’s testimony and Mr. Gage was convicted.

Afterward, the judge discovered that the prosecutor had unlawfully held back potentially exculpatory evidence, including medical reports indicating that the stepdaughter had been repeatedly untruthful with law enforcement. Her mother even described her as “a pathological liar” who “lives her lies.”

In 2015, when the case reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, Ms. Harris’s prosecutors defended the conviction. They pointed out that Mr. Gage, while forced to act as his own lawyer, had not properly raised the legal issue in the lower court, as the law required.

The appellate judges acknowledged this impediment and sent the case to mediation, a clear signal for Ms. Harris to dismiss the case. When she refused to budge, the court upheld the conviction on that technicality. Mr. Gage is still in prison serving a 70-year sentence.


That case is not an outlier. Ms. Harris also fought to keep Daniel Larsen in prison on a 28-year-to-life sentence for possession of a concealed weapon even though his trial lawyer was incompetent and there was compelling evidence of his innocence. Relying on a technicality again, Ms. Harris argued that Mr. Larsen failed to raise his legal arguments in a timely fashion. (This time, she lost.)

She also defended Johnny Baca’s conviction for murder even though judges found a prosecutor presented false testimony at the trial. She relented only after a video of the oral argument received national attention and embarrassed her office.

And then there’s Kevin Cooper, the death row inmate whose trial was infected by racism and corruption. He sought advanced DNA testing to prove his innocence, but Ms. Harris opposed it. (After The New York Times’s exposé of the case went viral, she reversed her position.)

All this is a shame because the state’s top prosecutor has the power and the imperative to seek justice. In cases of tainted convictions, that means conceding error and overturning them. Rather than fulfilling that obligation, Ms. Harris turned legal technicalities into weapons so she could cement injustices.


In “The Truths We Hold,” Ms. Harris’s recently published memoir, she writes: “America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.”

She adds, “I know this history well — of innocent men framed, of charges brought against people without sufficient evidence, of prosecutors hiding information that would exonerate defendants, of the disproportionate application of the law.”

All too often, she was on the wrong side of that history.

It is true that politicians must make concessions to get the support of key interest groups. The fierce, collective opposition of law enforcement and local district attorney associations can be hard to overcome at the ballot box. But in her career, Ms. Harris did not barter or trade to get the support of more conservative law-and-order types; she gave it all away.

Of course, the full picture is more complicated. During her tenure as district attorney, Ms. Harris refused to seek the death penalty in a case involving the murder of a police officer. And she started a successful program that offered first-time nonviolent offenders a chance to have their charges dismissed if they completed a rigorous vocational training. As attorney general, she mandated implicit bias training and was awarded for her work in correcting a backlog in the testing of rape kits.


But if Kamala Harris wants people who care about dismantling mass incarceration and correcting miscarriages of justice to vote for her, she needs to radically break with her past.

A good first step would be to apologize to the wrongfully convicted people she has fought to keep in prison and to do what she can to make sure they get justice. She should start with George Gage.


51248315_605141509956418_6217709113720176640_n.jpg

giphy.gif
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: POLITICO


90



Harris town hall sets CNN viewing record


The televised town hall with Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) set a CNN viewing record, the network said Tuesday.

The event, moderated by CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday night in Des Moines, Iowa, averaged 1.957 million views — the most for a single-candidate town hall in the network's history, and 75 percent above its four-week average in the 10 p.m slot, CNN said in a news release, citing Nielsen ratings. Monday's average of 712,000 viewers aged 25-45 eclipsed its competitors in that key demographic: MSNBC had 404,000 during the same hour, while Fox News had 395,000.

The highest-rated single-candidate town hall on cable news among all viewers was in August 2016, when 2.7 million people watched Donald Trump on Fox News, a little more than two months before he was elected.

The town hall allowed Harris to outline her platform as she vies for her party’s presidential nomination. Harris officially announced her candidacy Sunday and entered a potentially crowded field, from veteran Democrats like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York to newer faces on the national stage like Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.

During the event, Harris laid out several policy objectives, including an endorsement of a “Green New Deal” to combat climate change, calling the issue an “existential threat.” Harris also castigated the Trump administration for its handling of undocumented immigrants and the president’s fight for a border wall, accusing the president of playing with the lives of undocumented immigrants for political gain.

Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, also defended her record in law enforcement, which has been criticized by some more liberal elements of the Democratic Party for being too tough on crime. Harris said she had been “consistent my whole career” and that she had worked to reform the criminal justice system, listing initiatives she’s taken to improve accountability among California law enforcement.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated a viewing record that CNN set on Monday night. It was for the network, not for all cable news.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Many are fawning over Senator Kamala Harris' presidential bid announcement.

I myself won't automatically support her just because she has "Black" ancestry or that she belongs to a "Black" sorority or because she went to an HBCU. If we have learned anything, we have learned that when a "Black" politician wants to appeal to the mainstream, the first thing they do is attempt to prove that they can "tough" on their own supposed people.


Senator Harris has some question to answer:

 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: JACOBIN


kamala-harris.jpg


The Two Faces of Kamala Harris

By BRANKO MARCETIC

Kamala Harris has matched every one of her progressive achievements with conservative ones.

The first seven months of the Trump administration has seen an ever-changing coterie of high-profile Democrats probing the possibility of launching a 2020 run to take back the White House, from Joe Biden and Corey Booker, to Kirsten Gillibrand and Deval Patrick, and maybe even Hillary Clinton for a third time. The latest name to join this carousel of political ambition is recently elected California Senator Kamala Harris. Her rise to the top of the 2020 shortlist has been long in the making, with Democratic bigwigs recognizing her potential star power as early as 2008, when she campaigned for Obama.

Harris’s rise has produced a fiery debate among liberals and the Left. Leftists and progressives have come out in strong opposition to Harris’s candidacy, with some declaring #NeverKamala and some high-profile Bernie Sanders supporters, such as National Nurses United executive director RoseAnn DeMoro, making clear their lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy. For some prominent liberals, this pushback is simply the product of virulent racism and sexism among an imagined (and non-existent) all-white, all-male, Sanders-supporting base.

While most Harris-supporting liberals wouldn’t go this far, there is deep suspicion among some Democrats that opposition to Harris is motivated by similarly less-than-noble motives — namely, that it’s part of a project of poisoning the well for any potential challengers of a Bernie Sanders or Sanders-like candidacy in 2020.

In truth, there is much about Harris’s long record as a public prosecutor in California — the vast bulk of her career — that is up for legitimate criticism by any prospective 2020 Democratic voters.

Throughout her career, Harris has been called the “female Obama.” In reference to her race, this is lazy and arguably even racist. But the comparison is apt with reference to her politics. Harris has emulated the Obama approach, delivering a combination of some notable progressive victories and pleasant rhetoric and a steadfast avoidance of structural change — paired, in some cases, with far-from-progressive policies.

Where Credit is Due

First, the good. Harris’s career has been laudatory at times.

The first test of Harris’s principles came in 2004, after she was elected as San Francisco’s district attorney (DA) while promising never to impose capital punishment. Less than six months into her tenure, Harris defied a united chorus of voices — from the city’s police chief and police rank and file, to Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein — calling for the death penalty for a twenty-one-year-old who killed an undercover police officer.

During the officer’s funeral, two thousand officers gave Feinstein a standing ovation after a speech in which she criticized Harris, who was also at the funeral. The state’s attorney general and former senator Barbara Boxer (whose seat Harris has now taken) looked for ways to circumvent Harris’s decision, but ultimately failed. Thanks in large part to Harris’s steadfastness, the killer was spared the death penalty.

In other words, at the very start of her career, Harris defied her own party, her city’s police department, and endured public humiliation to defy reactionary demands.

Later, in 2009, Harris’s Republican rival for attorney general attempted to use her anti-capital punishment stance against her and turn the race, in his words, into “a referendum on the death penalty.” Harris didn’t budge.

Harris has been a frequent critic of the criminal justice system, an encouraging sign. She outlined her philosophy in her 2009 bookSmart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safe, the title of which has become a common refrain for Harris. Her “smart” approach, according to the book, involves focusing on “short-circuiting the criminal careers of offenders much earlier,” “getting offenders out of the system permanently,” ensuring “lower rates of recidivism,” and “investing in comprehensive efforts to reduce the ranks of young offenders entering the criminal justice system.” One of her suggestions was to teach nonviolent inmates and some juvenile offenders skills for employment.

To that end, Harris supported reforming California’s three-strikes law, refrained from seeking life sentences for criminals who committed nonviolent “third strikes,” and in 2004 instituted the Back on Track program, which put first-time offenders between ages eighteen and twenty-four into eighteen-month-long city college apprentice programs, which contributed to the city’s recidivism rates dropping from 54 percent to 10 percent in six years. She would later order parole officers not to enforce residency restrictions against sex offenders.

Over her time as DA and, later, as California attorney general, she took a number of progressive stances. She opposed the anti-gay Proposition 8, helped defend Obamacare in court, supported an undocumented immigrant’s bid for a law license, sponsoredlegislation that increased transparency around websites’ data collection, opposed California’s despicable “shoot the gays” ballot initiative, and filed a brief in the Supreme Court encouraging it to allow public universities to consider race in admissions. Under her direction, the state’s justice department adopted body cameras, California police were made to undergo implicit racial bias training, and her office received an award for accelerating the testing of rape kits.

Harris also had a respectable record of standing up to corporate malfeasance. She filed a friend-of-the-court brief signed by thirty-one other state attorneys general in 2011 in a Supreme Court case looking to end the practice of drug companies paying competitors to keep generic versions of their drugs off the market. In 2012, she set up a privacy enforcement protection unit in the attorney general’s office, which at one point fined a company for surreptitiously installing spyware on its customers’ computers.

In 2011, she brought the largest fraud settlement in decades against a company that had spent fifteen years overcharging the state’s insurance program for the poor and disabled. She reached a $6.5 million settlement with two former Countrywide executives over predatory lending and called for a Homeowners’ Bill of Rights, which led foreclosures to plummet in the state and Daily Kos to declare her“a bankster’s worst nightmare.”

Harris also has a strong history of going after polluters. As district attorney, she created San Francisco’s first Environmental Justice Unit and went after cases involving illegal dumping and air pollution. As attorney general, she went after companies including BP, Chevron, Comcast, Cosco Busan, ExxonMobil, and South California Gas Company, with Cosco Busan agreeing to the largest settlement of its kind for its 2007 spill in the San Francisco Bay.

With Trump in office, Harris has become even more outspoken. She’s come out in support of single-payer health care and free college tuition for families earning less than $140,000 a year. She’s a frequent critic of Trump’s policies. In her short time in the Senate, she’s put forward bills to end the pay gap for black women and clarify the rightsof people detained at US ports of entry, and cosponsored bills to raise the federal minimum wage, close tax loopholes for Big Oil, ban agricultural use of dangerous pesticides, and stop new oil and gas leases as well as the renewal of old ones in the Arctic Ocean.

Going by all this, Harris’s record seems impressive. But it and, indeed, her commitment to her stated principles, is less pristine upon closer inspection.


“Smart on Crime”

Much as Obama pursued policies starkly opposed to his own rhetoric, Harris’s record is defined by policies that undercut her proclaimed vision.

The death penalty is a prime example. Harris deserves credit for refusing to execute a man while under tremendous pressure to do so. But despite her vaunted personal opposition, she never challenged the death penalty during her time as attorney general — and in fact did the very opposite, actively working to keep it in existence.

When a federal judge ruled California’s enforcement of the death penalty unconstitutional, Harris appealed what she called a “flawed” decision. She would continue to defend the death penalty as the case wound through the federal courts.

One might counter that it’s the job of the attorney general to defend state law, regardless of her views. Yet in stark contrast, Harris refusedto defend the anti-gay Proposition 8 in court, calling it “a proposition that was found by a judge to be unconstitutional.”

You can see this pattern in Harris’s approach to criminal justice. Today, Harris talks a good game. She attacked her rival for Boxer’s senate seat for helping “fuel America’s mass incarceration crisis by voting to send more kids to prison, build more prisons and ratchet up mandatory minimums for nonviolent crimes.” She penned an op-edabout the tragedy of female incarceration, pointing out the abuse women receive in prisons, as well as prison’s economic costs to their dependents. She often says that the question of whether one should be “soft” or “tough” on crime is a false choice, and that one should instead be “smart” on crime.

Yet Harris’s “smart on crime” approach seems remarkably similar to a “tough on crime” one.

outlines, “Kamala believes that we must maintain a relentless focus on reducing violence and aggressively prosecuting violent criminals.” Fittingly, when she became San Francisco DA, the felony conviction rate rose from 52 percent to 67 percent in three years.

In practice, Harris defended California’s uniquely cruel three-strikes law, the only one in the country which imposed life sentences for a third “strike” that was any minor felony. She urged voters to reject Proposition 66, a ballot initiative that would have reformed the harsh law by making only serious or violent felonies trigger life sentences.

Harris promised that if voters rejected the initiative, she would put forward her own, different reform. But Harris’s proposal was a tepid half-measure: it simply eliminated some third strikes. Harris would later support a different ballot measure that was identical to Proposition 66, but continued to allow anyone previously convicted of murder, rape, or child molestation to receive life sentences for relatively minor third strikes (though it did also allow those with non-serious third strikes to petition for re-sentencing).

Harris’s bullishness on three strikes was unusual. When she ran for attorney general, her Republican opponent actually ran to her left on the issue. In fact, four years earlier, as the Los Angeles County district attorney, he had proposed a reform of the law. Harris had not supported it.

Sure, Harris had a reputation for being one of the few prosecutors who held off on seeking life sentences for nonviolent third strikes. But this meant little when leaving the law in place meant future, more aggressive prosecutors were free to keep imposing unjust sentences.

Fortunately, eventual reforms to the law meant this never happened, though it was no thanks to Harris. In 2012 and 2014, California voters passed two ballot initiatives that gave judges more discretion in sentencing and retroactively scaled back punishment for certain low-level crimes. Harris didn’t take a public position on either, claiming that taking a side would come into conflict with her duty to write the ballot text. A fellow Democrat who had preceded her as attorney general called the excuse “baloney.”

Harris’s commitment to harsh punitive measures wasn’t limited to the three-strikes law. For all her recent concern about the incarceration of women and its economic effects, as district attorney, she successfully championed a statewide version of an anti-truancy law she had put in place in San Francisco that threatened parents of chronically truant children with as much as a $2,000 fine and a year in jail. By October 2012, two mothers had been imprisoned under the law.

“We are putting parents on notice,” she said in her inaugural speech as attorney general. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”

Harris’s championing of the measures was an outgrowth of what she described as a passion for the issue of truancy that she had held since becoming San Francisco’s district attorney. But for its part, the Los Angeles Daily News — in an editorial that endorsed her, no less — argued that “it was hard not to conclude that Harris chose truancy as an election-season focus because it’s an issue without much political risk.”

At the time, Harris was pushing for statewide data collection on truancy, which she said would inform future anti-truancy policies and was something she had first introduced in San Francisco. Yet when the Daily News asked her what this data collection in the city had shown, “she seemed not to know or have thought about it,” the paper wrote.

Harris’s actions in the Daniel Larsen case are particularly concerning.

The Larsen case was a travesty of justice from start to finish. In 1999, when two police officers claimed they saw Larsen, who had earlier in his life been convicted for burglary, pull a six-inch-long knife from his waistband and throw it under a car, he was sentenced to twenty-seven years to life under the three-strikes law supported by Harris.

Forget for a second that the sentence was unduly harsh for the crime in question. Police had wrongly targeted Larsen for a search in the first place, and witnesses reported that it wasn’t Larsen but the man he was with who had thrown the knife. In trial, Larsen’s incompetent lawyer (who would later be disbarred) didn’t investigate a single witness, nor present one in trial.

Eleven years later, a judge reversed the conviction due to the lack of evidence and incompetence of Larson’s attorney’s. Yet two years later, Larsen was still in jail. Why? Because Harris, now a vocal opponent of mass incarceration, appealed the judge’s decision on the basis that Larsen had filed his paperwork too late — a technicality.

Tens of thousands of people petitioned Harris to release Larsen, and numerous civil rights groups similarly called on her to do the right thing. But even when he was eventually released from custody after fourteen years, Harris challenged his release, and five months later Larsen was back in court, fighting to stay out of prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

Harris’s concern about mass incarceration similarly failed to come up when California Governor Jerry Brown reacted to a Supreme Court order to reduce prison overcrowding by announcing a $730 million plan to move inmates to private prisons and vacant county jails. One would expect Harris may have had some words of criticism, especially as California’s senate president had an alternative, better plan that focused on getting inmates mental health and drug treatment. But she was silent. San Jose’s Mercury News criticized her inaction, rightly pointing out that “she wrote a book about” the issue.

Harris has also recently taken up the habit of reminding us that “the war on drugs was a failure.” Yet Harris’s record on drug reform while attorney general is nonexistent.

She opted not to join in other states’ attempts to take marijuana off the DEA’s list of most dangerous substances. When Obama raided California’s medical marijuana dispensaries, Harris put out an empty statement. When asked about legalizing recreational marijuana in 2012, only a week after the New York Times endorsed national legalization and less than a year before she started warning about the failure of the war on drugs. Harris laughed. As was the case with respect to the three-strikes law, her 2014 Republican opponent ran to her left on the issue.

The limits of Harris’s approach are likewise evident in her actions on police shootings. She did back a bill that required reports on officer-involved shootings to be posted publicly online and mandated bias training and that justice department agents wear body cameras. But as district attorney, she refused to hand over the names of police officers whose testimonies had led to convictions despite the officers’ arrest records and histories of misconduct. As attorney general, she also opposed instituting police body cameras statewide and stood against a bill requiring her office to investigate fatal police shootings.

Members of California’s Legislative Black Caucus (who are fellow Democrats) criticized her over the latter, as did Melina Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter activist and professor of pan-African studies, who commented: “This is not the time for timidity. … Martin Luther King said if you tell black people to wait, that means never.”

These are just a few of a large group of civil rights advocates and activists who criticized her on the matter, including San Francisco public defender Jeff Adachi and Phelicia Jones, an organizer with the Justice for Mario Woods Coalition and a former Harris supporter, who wondered “how many more people need to die” before Harris stepped in, and accused her of “turn[ing] your back on the people who got you to where you are.” Although Harris’s defenders have singled out a small number of her critics who are white, complaining that it’s “the same three people” criticizing of her, it’s not hard to find a range of people who criticize her record, many of whom are people of color.

In fact, despite being well-placed to reshape California’s criminal justice system, Harris has something of a reputation in the state as a marginal figure on the issue. As the Orange County Register put it, she was viewed by some as a “too-cautious and often calculating politician” who has avoided hot-button issues.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, told the Sacramento Bee that Harris could’ve been “a more vigorous advocate for full criminal justice reform” and that she was “unwilling to be big and bold.” “Harris’s role has not been pivotal” in reshaping the criminal justice system, the paper wrote. “The pyramid shook, but often it wasn’t her doing the shaking.”

Harris tried to dismiss a suit brought by California inmates over the state’s use of solitary confinement, with her office insisting “there is no ‘solitary confinement’ in California prisons” (despite this, the case ultimately turned into a landmark settlement that struck a blow against the practice). She tried to block a transgender inmate’s request for gender reassignment surgery. When a prosecuting attorney inserted a falsified confession into the transcript of a defendant’s confession, committing what an appeals court called “outrageous government misconduct,” Harris appealed the case, arguing that it wasn’t “outrageous” because it didn’t involve physical brutality.

One of the more egregious blots on Harris’s record is her hostility to sex workers’ rights.

fought a suit brought by a sex workers’ rights organization to legalize prostitution in California. But much worse was her hounding of Backpage, an online classified website frequently used by sex workers, which Harris brought criminal charges against suspiciously close to her senate election, accusing it of being “the world’s top online brothel.” The relentless pressure eventually forced the website to shut down its adult advertising section.

Backpage was by no means an admirable organization — it was frequently used for child sex trafficking in addition to ordinary sex work (although Lois Lee, who headed a shelter for sex trafficking victims, called its shutdown “a sad day” because it had been a “critical investigative tool” for law enforcement to recover missing children and prosecute pimps). But it was also a cheap, easy, and safe way for sex workers to find clients without having to go on the streets or work with pimps. Its closure threw sex workers into uncertainty and peril.

“Kamala Harris pressured that place to shut down, but she did not create any programs that are gonna help California mothers take better care of their families with better economic access to safe housing, education, health care,” one sex worker complained. “Sex workers choose to do this work so we can pay for those things.”

Harris has at least shown the capacity to move in the right direction on some issues. She recently penned a New York Times op-ed with Rand Paul explaining how bail “disproportionately harms people from low-income communities and communities of color,” calling for its reform or replacement (her and Paul put forward a bill to do so). But as late as June 2016 she was defending the constitutionality of bail in court. By December of that year, she was arguing the opposite.


Not-So-Civil Liberties

Given Harris’s stance on crime, it’s perhaps unsurprising that she was not always the most ardent civil liberties defender.

It’s true that Harris ordered California parole officers not to enforce blanket residency restrictions on sex offenders. This order ended the unjust application of a law that in many cases made it impossible for someone convicted of a sex offense to live anywhere, and increased the homeless sex offender population by twenty-four times in three years. (In addition to the barbarity of making anyone homeless, sex offenders’ risk of reoffending rises dramatically with homelessness, arguably, and ironically, making the public less safe.)

But she had only done so after the state Supreme Court ruled the restrictions to be unconstitutional, and only after she had appealedthe same decision by a lower court. Harris supported Jessica’s Law, the ballot measure that instituted these rules, back in 2006. Similar to her stance on the three-strikes law, her 2010 Republican opponent ran to her left on this issue.

Around the same time, Harris sponsored legislation that would have banned sex offenders from using social media sites like Facebook. The bill received much criticism, not only due to concerns for privacy and civil liberties, but also because it was ineffective — most sex crimes against children are committed by people they know, and most adults who solicited sex from kids online weren’t registered sex offenders. But as many pointed out, Harris was sponsoring the bill the same year she was running to be attorney general.

Harris was also a big booster of familial DNA searches, a controversial technique whereby investigators compare a DNA sample to other samples in a DNA database to find possible relatives, then use additional genetic testing and analysis to confirm the match, all in order to solve crimes. Due to privacy concerns, the technique hasn’t been adopted in Canada, and was outlawed in both Maryland and DC. Among the concerns are the not-infrequent cases of human error in DNA evidence, the fact that familial testing would disproportionately impact communities of color, the potential revelation of family secrets, and the already existing instances of mistakes being made with the technique.

California was the first state to adopt the technique in 2009 under Jerry Brown, but Harris eagerly kept it going. In 2011, she announced new funding to double the amount of familial searches, telling the LA Times “California is on the cutting edge of this in many ways,” and that “I think we are going to be a model for the country. I really do.”

In fact, California’s use of familial DNA testing is particularly invasive, as the state allows the collection and preservation of DNA samples from anyone who is arrested, even if they’re not charged with a crime. The ACLU originally sued to block California’s DNA collection when an Oakland woman had been arrested during a San Francisco protest against the Iraq War and forced to give a DNA sample despite not being charged with any crime.

Harris was likewise a firm proponent of civil asset forfeiture, sponsoring a bill to allow prosecutors to seize profits before charges were even filed. Years before that, she opposed AB 639, a bill that aimed to reform asset forfeiture. The bill easily cleared the state assembly, but was soon scuttled by a united wall of opposition from law enforcement, with whom Harris was united.

There was also the case of the Sikh man who was barred from working as a prison guard because of his religiously mandated beard. Harris argued that his beard prevented him from being properly fitted with a gas mask, thus disqualifying him from the job, despite California’s corrections and rehabilitation department’s regulations allowing guards to have beards for certain medical reasons.

A number of civil rights and legal organizations — including the ACLU of Northern California, the Asian American Bar Association, and the Council on American Islamic Relations — wrote Harris a letter pointing out this inconsistency. She argued that the medical exemption only applied to guards who passed the mask fitting before the policy took effect, although the man’s attorney said this was untrue.

Any future Democratic president is going to inherit the now nearly sixteen-year-old “war on terror,” which has already hollowed out many civil liberties protections for the sake of security and has the potential to do much more. Harris’s record on the matter as a prosecutor thus deserves careful consideration.


Settling for Less

Arguably the most significant accomplishment on Harris’s record is her treatment of banks that were involved in widespread foreclosure fraud.

It is clear this will be one of the key selling points to any future Harris 2020 run, so it deserves special attention. She touted her 2011 mortgage settlement deal in her 2012 DNC speech, and at the 2016 California Democrats Convention, she was introduced as someone who was “very tough on the banks when they try to foreclose on working families.”

Harris’s actions on the issue in many ways serve as a microcosm of her broader political agenda. The foreclosure deal, while an impressive and landmark settlement, was also a half-measure that delivered far less to the public than it seems at first glance, ultimately failing to properly take the banks to task for their criminality.

Obviously, credit where credit is due: in September 2011, Harris pulled California out of nationwide mortgage settlement talks with the five biggest mortgage servicers, a gutsy move that won her praise from homeowner groups and involved defying Obama, her close ally. Harris did this after meeting personally with the banks’ representatives, who were offering California what she called“crumbs on the table” and reportedly asking to be let off the hook from legal action over any misconduct they had committed. Harris thought she could get Californians a better deal. She told the banks, “I am going to investigate everything.”

At the same time, Harris’s decision to pull out has to be understood in the context of the widespread activism that pressured her to do so.

At the time, Harris was under pressure from union leaders, other politicians, and housing rights activists. As one member of the progressive coalition of groups put it, “It wasn’t like she was some hard-charging AG that wanted to take on the banks” — rather, “it took a lot of work to get her where we needed her to be.” Harris withdrew the day after these groups sent her a letter, signed on by Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential future rival, calling the deal“deeply flawed” and “outrageous.”

The deal Harris got for California was ultimately much better. It provided $18.4 billion in debt relief and $2 billion in other financial assistance, as well as incentives for relief to center on the hardest hit counties. This is particularly impressive when one considers the banks had originally only offered California, the state hardest hit by the housing crisis and fraud, $2-4 billion.

Nonetheless, the settlement was woefully inadequate. For one, while the $20 billion total sounds good, it was a fraction of what the banks would have had to pay to compensate for all of their malfeasance. For instance, investors had won $8.5 billion in a settlement with Bank of America over mortgage securities backed by faulty loans.

Secondly, the banks themselves paid very little — only around $5 billion, with most of the settlement involving the banks modifying loans owned by others, such as pension funds, who had nothing to do with the misconduct that necessitated the deal. In terms of direct financial relief, underwater homeowners — weighed down by average debt of close to $65,000 each — received around $1,500 to $2,000 each. One called it “a slap in the face for a lot of us.”

year later, only one-fifth of the aid went to first-mortgage principal forgiveness. And even at the end of this, just 84,102 California families had any mortgage debt forgiven — far short of the 250,000 originally predicted.

On top of this, under the deal, loans owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn’t qualify for the debt relief. Given they were the country’s biggest mortgage holders, this meant even fewer homeowners stood to benefit from the deal.

Harris explained that while the deal was imperfect, she was forced to make do as the clock was ticking. “Every day there are homeowners in California who will either receive relief so they can stay in their home, or will be in the foreclosure process and potentially lose their home,” she said. “And that always weighed heavily on my mind.” Rob McKenna, one of the lead negotiators on the settlement said that “at some point you have to decide that it’s more important to get relief to consumers sooner than to get more through the court.” Similarly, journalist David Dayen believed Harris had “played a bad hand relatively well,” and that prosecuting would have taken more time and a bigger coalition of prosecutors than she had at the time.

Still, there were numerous critics. Writing in the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik savaged the deal and what he called the “rosy self-congratulation” that followed it, particularly the new foreclosure standards it imposed, which he called a “big whoop.” “The provisions mostly require mortgage lenders and servicers to comply with what I would have thought was already the law, which prohibits, you know, criminal fraud,” he wrote.

“This settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America,” wrote Susan Webber. “It adds insult to injury to see some try to depict it as a win for long suffering, still abused homeowners.” “There’s virtually no benefit to borrowers, and yet you give the banks credit for short sales and getting second liens wiped out — something they were going to have to do anyway,” complainedBruce Marks, founder of housing counseling group Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America.

More importantly, ordinary homeowners who had been shafted by the banks remained angry. During Harris’s Senate campaign, her opponent was flanked by members of Occupy Fights Foreclosures, an outgrowth of Occupy LA, as she criticized Harris (however disingenuously) for not prosecuting a single top bank executive. The group had earlier written Harris a letter calling for her to implement a moratorium on foreclosures until she finished investigating fraud. Frustrated homeowners complained of being denied meetings with Harris over the span of years, and protested at the 2015 California Democrats State Convention.

There was no better symbol of Harris’s inability to hold the people behind the foreclosure fraud to account than her Mortgage Fraud Strike Force. Opened to much fanfare in 2011 and employing twenty-five Department of Justice lawyers and investigators with a budget of more than $2 million to go after foreclosure fraud, the strike force managed to prosecute just ten cases in three years, an East Bay Express investigation in 2014 found.

The paper found that not only had the strike force prosecuted less foreclosure fraud cases than many other states, but it had filed fewer lawsuits than attorneys general in smaller states with fewer victims, and even fewer than some county district attorneys. Yet California led the country in terms of such scam operations, with many thousands of complaints since 2010. One housing rights activist who had lost his home in a fraud called the strike force a “public relations effort.”

Harris has repeatedly said she was limited in what she could do. When a man at the 2016 California Democratic Party convention asked her, “How many bankers went to jail?” she said they did the best with what evidence there was. “I too, like most Americans, am frustrated. Clearly crimes occurred and people should go to jail,” she told the LA Times last year. “But we went where the evidence took us.”

This demonstrably wasn’t always the case, however. Earlier this year, the Intercept obtained a 2013 memo to Harris from prosecutors in the attorney general’s office saying they had “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct” at OneWest Best, and urging Harris to “conduct a full investigation of a national bank’s misconduct and provide a public accounting of what happened.” Yet Harris never did. (Coincidentally, Harris was the only Democratic Senate candidate in 2016 to get a donation from Steven Mnuchin, OneWest’s former CEO).

One has to wonder whether there are other, similar memos out there, and how many.


“An Opportunity to Shine”

Harris’s many boosters in the media will tell you that none of this matters. Rather than doing their job of scrutinizing the record of a prospective presidential candidate, they argue, they and other journalists should simply keep quiet and “give her an opportunity to shine or not shine,” rather than “undercut her before she even begins.”

This is an obviously ludicrous idea, particularly coming from anyone who considers themselves a journalist. But beyond that, if Harris plans on making a run for president, which she has shown every intention of doing, anyone intending to play a role in selecting the Democratic candidate come 2020 — from middle-of-the-road liberals to leftists — should have a clear-eyed understanding of her record.

It’s undoubtable that there are many things in Harris’ history to be encouraged by, from her pursuit of corporate polluters and her implementation of policies to prevent recidivism in the past, to her more recent steadfast opposition to the Trump administration and her support of progressive legislation in the Senate.

But it helps no one to turn acknowledgement of her positives into a starry-eyed distortion of her record. Every politician — including Bernie Sanders — has some bad to go with the good on their record. But in Harris’ case, the bad has often directly undercut the good.

It should matter to us that Harris, the ardent criminal justice reformer, not only did little to enact this reform during her years as a prosecutor but backed harsh, punitive policies that undermined her own progressive rhetoric on the issue. It should matter that she at times did so needlessly, taking a harsher stance than her right-wing opponents. It should matter that she repeatedly attempted to keep an innocent man locked up in prison and attempted to defend a falsified confession.

And if she continues to sell herself to the public as a take-no-prisoners prosecutor who went after financial misdeeds in defense of the ordinary homeowner, then it should matter that her record on this was more underwhelming than even some county district attorneys.

These are not narrow, niche issues. In fact, many of them — criminal justice reform, drug legalization, foreclosure fraud — are ones that particularly affect communities of color. And despite her rhetoric now, Harris has often been either inactive or on the wrong side of them.

Harris has shown the capacity to be moved leftwards when pressured by activism. This is no small thing. But you can’t pressure Harris — or any other politician, for that matter — without having an understanding of her record beyond the fuzzy PR that Democratic loyalists are currently trying to substitute for actual political discussion. Perhaps Harris will end up the 2020 nominee. Then it’s all the more important we understand her inadequacies.
 

littleitalympc

wannabe star
Registered



HER FATHER DISOWNED HER

She's nothing more than another Hillary with the same skin-tone as Obama.

And both of them are puppet frauds who have done nothing to benefit anyone other than Wall St & corporate America, while furthering the militarization of police force, removal of civil liberties.
 

VAiz4hustlaz

Proud ADOS and not afraid to step to da mic!
BGOL Investor

The Human Costs Of Kamala Harris’ War On Truancy

The “progressive prosecutor” wanted to transform how California responded to students missing school. Parents like Cheree Peoples wound up paying the price.
By Molly Redden
03/27/2019 04:50 pm ET Updated 7 hours ago

On the morning of April 18, 2013, in the Los Angeles suburb of Buena Park, a throng of photographers positioned themselves on a street curb and watched as two police officers entered a squat townhouse. Minutes later, their cameras began clicking. The officers had re-emerged with a weary-looking woman in pajamas and handcuffs, and the photographers were jostling to capture her every step.

“You would swear I had killed somebody,” the woman, Cheree Peoples, said in a recent interview.

In fact, Peoples had been arrested for her daughter’s spotty school attendance record under a truancy law that then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris had personally championed in the state legislature. The law, enacted in January 2011, made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents to allow kids in kindergarten through eighth grade to miss more than 10 percent of school days without a valid excuse. Peoples’ 11-year-old daughter, Shayla, had missed 20 days so far that school year.

5c9a339c2400009d00041fc2.jpeg

BRUCE CHAMBERS/SCNG/ZUMA
TOP PHOTO: Cheree Peoples outside of the apartment where she lives when her 17-year-old daughter, Shayla, is at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Peoples was arrested six years ago for Shayla’s repeated truancy despite ample evidence given to the Orange County school showing Shayla suffers from sickle cell anemia, which leaves her in constant pain and requires frequent hospitalization. (Credit: Tara Pixley for HuffPost)
ABOVE: Buena Park police officers Luis Garcia (left) and James Woo escort Peoples, 33, to their patrol car on April 18, 2013. She was handcuffed and under arrest.
The law was the capstone of Harris’ yearslong campaign to get “tough” on truancy, the term for when a child consistently misses school without a valid excuse. Harris’ involvement began in the mid-2000s, when the future senator and 2020 presidential candidate was the San Francisco district attorney. Harris had been disturbed to learn that a disproportionate number of the city’s homicide victims were high school dropouts, and that dropouts are more likely to become perpetrators or victims of crimes. Preventing truancy, she argued, was not just about the noble goal of ensuring every child’s education, but a matter of averting future criminals. So it only made sense for the city’s top law enforcement officer to get involved. Harris filed charges against a handful of San Francisco parents whose elementary school-aged children were consistently missing school.

A few years later, she persuaded the state legislature to adopt harsher penalties for truancy. Under the new law, the parent or guardian of a young, truant child could face a fine of $2,500 or more — or one year in jail. Harris pushed hard for the law as she was running for attorney general, and it passed just as she won the election.

“We are putting parents on notice,” Harris said at her 2011 inauguration. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”

Orange County heeded her call with particular enthusiasm. On the morning Peoples was arrested, police arrested five other parents — including several in front of waiting news crews — as part of what one assistant district attorney painted as an effort to prevent children from “being criminals or joining a gang.” The district attorney described Peoples’ conduct in unsparing terms, telling local news outlets she had ignored the school’s numerous requests for meetings and multiple warnings that Shayla was truant.

“The defendant was offered counseling and parenting classes,” read a press release from the district attorney’s office. “The student was provided the opportunity for a mentor through Big Brothers Big Sisters of Orange County, a mentor at school [and] monthly meetings with law enforcement officers.” Peoples never responded to those offers, it claimed.

5c9a35912400002e074f40c4.jpeg

BRUCE CHAMBERS/SCNG/ZUMA
Peoples in handcuffs on April 18, 2013.
Peoples read all this several days later in a state of disbelief. She has a soft manner and voice and has dedicated most of her adult life to caring for Shayla — who has lived with sickle cell anemia, a serious genetic illness that causes her acute pain and requires frequent hospitalization and medical procedures, since birth.

Shayla frequently missed school because she was in too much pain to leave the house or was hospitalized for long-term care. Her school was aware of these circumstances; it had records on file from the regional children’s hospital explaining that Shayla’s condition would necessitate unpredictable absences and special educational accommodations. Peoples and the school had worked together to set up some of those accommodations, which are required under federal disability law. At the time of her arrest, Peoples claims she was fighting with the school to get it to agree to additional accommodations under an Individualized Education Plan, which she said the school had rejected.

“This is a young woman who spends a lot of her life in the hospital,” Peoples said. “How is it that she’s giving off the impression of being a gang member? … Why are they coming after me?”

Peoples was caught up in the hugely complex forces Harris and her tough-on-truancy stance unleashed more than a decade ago.

Harris has since replaced her punitive stance with the message that parents of truant children need help, not scare tactics. It’s a shift that happened roughly in step with voters’ waning tolerance for using the criminal justice system to address complicated social problems and Harris’ own preparations to seek higher office. In the memoir she released shortly before announcing her candidacy for president, Harris described her work on truancy as “trying to support parents, not punish them.”

Her evolution also supports the story she’s telling voters on the 2020 campaign trail: that she was trying to change the system from within in a way that is “consistent with progressive values.” She has packaged herself as part of a new generation of “progressive prosecutors” who used the office to achieve transformational change.

5c9a3fc52400007b00041fd5.jpeg

TARA PIXLEY FOR HUFFPOST
Peoples massages Shayla, who is being treated for sickle cell anemia at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, on March 10.
Yet the penalties she once championed for truancy and the way she originally thought about the issue are foundational to how California handles truancy today. Peoples’ arrest wasn’t a freak occurrence ― it was the inevitable outcome of Harris’ campaign to fuse the problem of truancy with the apparatus of law enforcement. And Peoples is far from an outlier. There are still hundreds of families across California entering the criminal justice system under the aegis of Harris’ law.


“I think it was a good thing that she shined a light on [truancy],” Jeff Adachi, who served as San Francisco’s chief public defender from January 2003 until his death on Feb. 22, told HuffPost in February. “There is a correlation between children who fail at school and what happens later in life. [But] the idea of locking parents up, or citing them with a crime because they’re not taking their children to school — it doesn’t address the root of the problem.”

Adachi said Harris’ record on truancy exemplified why he was always skeptical of the notion of a progressive prosecutor.

“That’s the common narrative, that you have a person who comes in and says, ‘I can change the system by becoming the system,’” he said in a January interview with public radio station KQED. “You can have some influence. But it’s a system because the people in power act according to the design. And if you’re a prosecutor, your job is to charge people with crimes.”

‘A Time Bomb’
Harris is hardly the first person to argue truancy should carry the possibility of jail time. Virtually every state has compulsory attendance laws and a long history of incarcerating parents — and even children — who fail to comply. A single county in Pennsylvania jailed more than 1,600 parents between 2000 and 2015 for their failure to pay truancy-related fines.

California law has made it possible to prosecute parents of truant children since at least 1977. That year, the state defined a truant as a student who was more than 30 minutes late to school three times, or who had missed three days of school, without a valid excuse; a truant’s parents could be fined $100 on their first conviction. Truancy wasn’t technically a jailable offense at the time, but prosecutors who wanted to see jail time often charged parents with the crime of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

Despite being the focus of so much enforcement, the question of what causes children to miss school wasn’t the subject of much scholarship until about 10 years ago.

Hedy Chang, the executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit that studies and promotes best practices for reducing school absence, walked me through some of the emerging research, much of which is no surprise: Regular school attendance is vital to almost every aspect of a child’s future. Young children who miss too much school are less likely to develop basic social and academic skills as a consequence, and they are more likely to fall behind in class and drop out of school as they grow older. The tipping point for when the risk sets in is around 10 percent of missed instructional time. And the negative effects of missing school are more pronounced for children in lower-income families.

Researchers have identified some common reasons for school absences including barriers outside the school, such as a chronic illness, a lack of housing or not having a safe path to school; a negative school experience, such as a harsh or biased learning atmosphere; a lack of engagement because of something like high teacher turnover; or a lack of understanding, on the part of parents, of the risks of missing too much school.

Other new research has called the law-and-order approach into question. The evidence increasingly shows that pure punishment is less effective than prevention. Schools can prevent many instances of truancy by making parents aware of the associated academic risks and by identifying and fixing the systemic barriers to attendance, such as bullying, unreliable transit or safety issues.

There has been less research into the best methods of intervention, although it generally supports positive, personalized outreach. And there has been very little research into the appropriate role of law enforcement. According to what does exist, law enforcement is only effective when combined with earnest prevention efforts and outreach.

“A punitive legal approach, I just haven’t seen evidence that shows that works,” Chang said.

New research also suggests that “truancy” is an arbitrary metric. The term refers to unexcused absences, but California gives individual schools substantial flexibility to determine what constitutes a valid excuse. (Certain reasons, like illnesses and religious observances, are always valid by law.) As a measure of academic risk, it makes more sense for schools to track absences, since ultimately what matters is the amount of school a child misses and not the reason why.

“Truancy” is more like a measure of blame, and blame is subject to all sorts of biases. It’s not clear if students of color are more likely to have their absences deemed “unexcused” than white students who miss school for the same reasons. But we do know that black and Native American students, nationally, make up a disproportionate share of truant students.

5c9a40201f000050007ef3a4.jpeg

BETHANY MOLLENKOF/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGES
Then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris discusses the first statewide statistics on the elementary school truancy crisis during a symposium featuring officials in law enforcement, education and public policy on Sept. 30, 2013, in Los Angeles.
What jumped out to Harris was the connection between truancy in early childhood and devastating outcomes later in life. “Ignoring truant children is like tiptoeing over the sizzling fuse on a time bomb,” she wrote in her first book, Smart On Crime, in 2009.


As district attorney, she had her office send letters to every household with a child in public school explaining that truancy was a crime — and one she was prepared to prosecute. Most schools already had a policy of calling or meeting with parents whose children missed too much class, and school officials began referencing her threats in their phone calls. Harris assigned county prosecutors to attend those meetings and “look as stern as they could,” she wrote.

Community activists at the time found Harris’ threats shocking and “crude.” They predicted the hammer would come down hardest on the most vulnerable families and make their circumstances worse.

But Harris admirers said her focus on truancy exemplified her itch to transcend the traditional role of a prosecutor.

“The thing about Kamala that I saw on every issue I worked with her on, she is always asking, ‘What are the root causes of the problem?‘” said Jill Habig, who oversaw juvenile justice issues for Harris’ office after she was elected attorney general. “She really rejected the notion that all a prosecutor should do is focus on charging people with crimes and putting people in jail.”

Harris wasn’t perturbed by the criticisms, either. She charged six parents with infractions in 2008, using a newly created truancy court that had special procedures. The judge deferred any punishments as long as families began to comply with the law. “The goal was not to get them into trouble but to find a way to exert enough pressure on them that they would change,” said David Kopperud, the longtime chair of California’s statewide student attendance review board.

What it ended up being, practically, is families and kids having to come to court to be told to utilize certain services in order to come to school. Which, from where I sit, is very much the job of the school district and not the job of the criminal court.a public defender
San Francisco’s truancy rate began to fall. In a speech she gave a few years later, Harris credited her tough approach, saying, “We threatened the parents of truants with prosecution, and truancy dropped 32 percent.”

What distinguished Harris’ approach wasn’t the process itself as much as who was involved, and when. She was using the same basic system — the school identifies a truant student; the school contacts the parents; the school, or a local attendance board, holds a meeting, if necessary; the school refers the problem to the district attorney, if necessary — that counties across California had been following for decades. Harris’ innovation was that school authorities and the district attorney would work in concert, articulating the threat of prosecution much earlier in the process and keeping school officials involved long after a case was transferred to court.



Subscribe to the Politics email.
How will Trump's administration impact you?
“It was using the law to support what the school was doing, and vice versa,” Kopperud said. “And she had a lot of success.”

Limitations
Harris was elected California attorney general in 2010, and she wasted no time in taking her model statewide. Her office began to spotlight the counties with the most dismal truancy rates and how many tens of thousands of dollars it cost them. (A school’s average daily attendance is part of the state’s education funding formula, so schools lose money when students are frequently absent.) She highlighted best practices and issued sweeping recommendations for raising attendance with language that was notably softer than what she used in public.

“Early intervention by law enforcement should be supportive, not punitive,” the first report read. She added muscle to local attendance review boards — in the truancy process, they sit above the individual school but below the county court — by requiring them to include a representative of the district attorney’s office, and, after a brief outcry, of the public defender.

But it was her first victory that attracted the most notice and outrage: In 2011, at Harris’ urging, California enacted its first-ever criminal penalties for parents of truant children. Previously, having a truant child was an infraction punishable by a small fine. Under the new law, parents of truant children could be charged with a criminal misdemeanor and face a fine of at least $2,000, or up to one year in jail. The law defined a child to be truant if he or she missed 10 percent or more of school days without a valid excuse and the school district has attempted a certain number of interventions. Just as in her San Francisco trial run, the law allowed the court to defer judgment if the parent agreed to a mediation period and turned things around.

5c9a42642a000051034f6662.jpeg

MEDIANEWS GROUP/THE MERCURY NEWS VIA GETTY IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGES
Harris, who was the attorney general for California at the time, talks with students at the East Oakland Pride Elementary School in Oakland on Sept. 4, 2014. She sponsored legislation to help local school districts and communities address California’s elementary school truancy crisis.
By now, many felt the San Francisco model had clear limitations. Parents were not being jailed or fined en masse as activists had initially feared. But to critics, the language Harris used to encourage a truancy crackdown and the system she reinvigorated were cementing the idea that parents always were the ultimate source of the problem.

Most of the families in truancy court were dealing with circumstances largely or entirely out of their control, said a public defender who represented parents in San Francisco’s truancy court for many years.That often included violence at school or a school’s failure to accommodate a chronic illness. If a family wasn’t responding to the school, it was usually because they were dealing with bigger crises having to do with poverty. Almost all of the parents under the microscope were black or Latino.


“What it ended up being, practically, is families and kids having to come to court to be told to utilize certain services in order to come to school,” said a public defender who asked not to be named because she continues to work in juvenile justice. “Which, from where I sit, is very much the job of the school district and not the job of the criminal court.”

The system was not set up to correct the more powerful forces arrayed against the parents. “Their idea was, you’re not going to school, and — whether or not what the school district is doing is sufficient to get you to school — we have this mechanism to cite you,” the public defender said.

I put some of these criticisms to Katy Miller, a prosecutor in the San Francisco District Attorney’s office who has worked on truancy issues since Harris’ time.

“I ask myself those same questions, and I think [Harris] did as well: At the end of the day, what is the solution in these cases where we feel like everything has been offered and the dynamic hasn’t changed?” she said. “Are we just going to let it be? It’s a hard question, I think we should be very parsimonious as prosecutors.” In San Francisco, Miller said, the district attorney only takes parents to court if their kids have missed 40, 60 or even 80 days of school.

Habig defended Harris, noting that as attorney general, Harris formed a new agency called the Bureau of Children’s Justice to investigate and solve systemic barriers to education; the idea was to hold the education system accountable, not just parents.

As attorney general, however, Harris had limited influence over whether local prosecutors carried out the spirit of her new law. Several counties that had always taken a punitive approach simply reserved the new penalties for the parents they saw as the worst of the worst. Each year, Kings County, in the Central Valley, charges hundreds of parents with infractions under California’s old laws; it has charged 19 misdemeanors under Harris’ law in the past four years, and at least two mothers have been sentenced to jail. In Tulare County, also in the Central Valley, there have been 14 cases, and they bring officials there a sense of pride. In a brochure from a 2016 student attendance conference, the county lauded its attendance supervisor as having “successfully submitted” three truancy cases the district attorney charged under Harris’ new law, on top of 500 cases being charged under California’s old laws.

Orange County, where Peoples was arrested, has charged a total of 22 parents under Harris’ law. The district attorney’s office, Shayla’s elementary school, and the Buena Park School District all declined to answer questions about Peoples’ case or how prosecution decisions are made. Tony Rackauckus, who served as the district attorney at the time of Peoples’ arrest and left office this January, alsodeclined to answer questions but said he was “extremely proud” of his offices’ anti-gang efforts, including truancy enforcement. (Almost all of the truancy prosecutions under Rackauckus occurred in the 18 months leading up to one of his re-election campaigns; it’s not clear if this is a coincidence.)

And San Francisco — Harris’ old district — hasn’t actually charged any parents under the new law. Prosecutors there haven’t found it necessary to be that punitive, Miller said.

The Bully Pulpit
Assessing Harris’ legacy is difficult. She wasn’t the only one pushing new policies around truancy, and crucially, she didn’t get everything she wanted. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown (D), citing a need to preserve local autonomy, blocked a measure that would have forced all 58 counties to follow the same basic truancy process and a bill to track the number of truancy prosecutions that occurred under Harris’ law. As a result, the state stilldoesn’t know how many parents have been arrested, arraigned or full-on prosecuted under Harris’ criminal truancy statute, Kopperud said.

In fact, for all its investment in addressing chronic absenteeism, California isn’t sure if class attendance has gone up or down over the past decade. The state can’t make a clean comparison because it has changed the way it collects data several times, Kopperud said.

But no one really doubts that Harris had a meaningful impact.

“She was able to use her office as a bully pulpit for the understanding that chronic absence and truancy were both major issues, to help people understand the scope and scale … and the value of taking a positive, problem-solving approach,” said Chang, the Attendance Works executive. That made a much bigger difference than adding new criminal penalties, she said.

What Harris says from that bully pulpit has changed over the years. When she was San Francisco’s district attorney, she talked about “getting tough on truancy” and called truancy “a parent issue” stemming from “neglect.” If her prosecutors happened to discover that the parents they were prosecuting faced difficult circumstances, she framed it as incidental to the larger problem of failed parenting.


“Along the way, we learned some things about the situations some of these families faced and found we could help,” she wrote in Smart On Crime. “For example, we met a mother with three children who was homeless and holding down two jobs trying to get her situation under control.” Harris’ office helped her find housing.

Ten years later, Harris would say that connecting parents to the appropriate resources was the whole point. (Her campaign declined an interview request.)

“[Critics] assume that my motivation was to lock up parents, when of course that was never the goal,” she wrote in her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold. “Our effort was designed to connect parents to resources that could help them get their kids back into school, where they belonged. We were trying to support parents, not punish them—and in the vast majority of cases, we succeeded.”

Her story had evolved enough that I was curious to see which version applies in California today. So in February I traveled to Humboldt County, in northern California, to observe a monthly session of the county’s student attendance court. Outside there was a historic downpour, but Judge Joyce Hinrich’s voice was upbeat as she told the damp crowd of parents and students that her court was about changing behavior, not punishment. She promised there wouldn’t be any fines or jail time as long as the student’s attendance improved.

The judge led the court in several rounds of applause for families whose attendance was getting better, but eventually it came time for new arraignments. A woman named Shannon, who was there with a pair of little boys in rain boots and large sweatshirts, spoke to me in the hall with a shaking voice after entering a not-guilty plea.

“I’m very disturbed to be here again,” she said, her voice trembling. Her sons are avoiding school because they are being viciously bullied — recently, she said, another boy kicked her younger son in the crotch so hard he couldn’t walk the next day — and this was her second misdemeanor charge in five months. She felt as though she was out of options.

Rory Kalin, the public defender representing several parents that day, has heard countless similar stories. Kalin feels about one-third of his clients haven’t done anything wrong; in the other two-thirds of cases, the parents have made missteps against the backdrop of a larger issue such as poverty, homelessness or trauma. Humboldt County covers 4,000 square miles of rugged forest and lacks reliable transportation. It is also home to many Native American families, for whom school often has a traumatic association — government-run education, historically, was a tool of forced assimilation.

Although Kalin supports the student attendance court and says everyone is working in good faith, “there are these overarching issues that this court can’t address,” he said. “To hold a parent responsible for that is fundamentally unfair.”

School officials are deeply sensitive to these broader problems. For every Humboldt County parent facing prosecution — there were 35 misdemeanors charged in the 2017-18 school year, the county said — there are scores who worked with the schools to reach a solution before things escalated. Gillian Wadsworth, a licensed clinical social worker with the county education department, tries to help every parent avoid court by connecting them to free or low-cost services such as transportation, counseling, medical care, substance abuse treatment or temporary shelter.

When law enforcement takes the wheel, it tends to be because the family — often for complicated and sympathetic reasons — isn’t responsive and the school finds itself in a bind. Shannon hasn’t reached out to Wadsworth, she noted, and her phone number is disconnected.“The law is pretty clear,” Wadsworth said. “When the law is broken … right now the system that exists and can intervene is the criminal court.”

5c9a43af2400007b00041fd9.jpeg

TARA PIXLEY FOR HUFFPOST
Peoples outside of the apartment where she lives when Shayla is in the hospital.
And yet not everyone is subject to the same system. State-run classrooms for incarcerated youth have posted some of the highest truancy rates in California, often without consequence. The state’s private schools, which enroll an estimated 647,000 students, aren’t legally required to participate in this system, Habig confirmed, meaning parents who can afford private school are functionally exempt from truancy prosecutions.

Wadsworth understands these inequalities on a personal level. Her daughter, who is in high school, has a serious medical issue and at times has had to miss 20 percent of the school year. Wadsworth has never been in the kind of trouble that would land her in truancy court, in part because she knows “how to work the bureaucracy,” as she puts it. “My family has enough resources and connections and the skill base to make sure the school is happy with why it is that she’s absent and prevent any large-scale intervention in my life,” she said.

The families present in Hinrich’s court the day I visited have much more complicated lives. They hadn’t been arrested and perp-walked, and it’s unlikely any of them will wind up paying fines or serving jail time — Kalin, the public defender, could only recall one or two cases ending in formal punishment. But for many there will be a lasting sense of stigma, Kalin said.

For all his and Hinrich and Wadsworth’s efforts, there was no mistaking the place where they determined parents’ fates as anything other than a criminal court. An armed bailiff scolded people for having their phones out. “DO NOT COMMUNICATE WITH THE PRISONERS,” signs on the walls warned visitors.


As the last of the families trickled out, I exited to the hallway to find Martin Morris, an assistant district attorney.

“I hope you enjoyed what you saw today,” he said as he put on his winter coat. “It works for some and we’re happy with that.”

‘Living The Worst Nightmare’
Peoples’ case trudged through the judicial system for two years. She had dozens of court dates, at least one every month, and at times it seemed as if the entire district attorney’s office was involved. Her case was passed among eight different prosecutors, including a recent transfer from the homicide squad.

When she was with Shayla, she tried to mirror her daughter’s sunny outlook.

“She is a joy,” she said. “Shayla is one of those kids you wish every kid was like.”

In private, though, she was fraying. During her ordeal, Peoples kept an on-and-off video diary in which she appeared haggard and anxious. “It’s hard on the body, it’s hard on the mind,” she said softly in one entry. “Right now, I am living the worst nightmare that any mother could possibly understand and go through.”

But Peoples held fast to her not-guilty plea. She refused to agree to anything that didn’t amount to a total exoneration. She especially balked when the prosecution offered not to pursue the charges if she took parenting classes, thinking, what parenting classes could cure sickle cell? On Aug. 12, 2015, the charges were finally dismissed.

5c9a444f2400007b00041fda.jpeg

TARA PIXLEY FOR HUFFPOST
Peoples and Shayla.
Peoples does, in fact, struggle with the kinds of issues that the truancy process can supposedly bring to light and resolve.

There is the all-encompassing fact of her daughter’s illness, which causes Shayla chronic pain and has required regular hospital stays, including multiple surgeries and countless blood transfusions. Peoples is also dealing with all of the consequences of dedicating herself so fully to her daughter’s care. She cannot realistically hold a full-time job. She has struggled to afford a place to live, faced eviction, and dealt with homelessness. On certain dates when the school alleges it was trying to meet with her, Peoples was recovering from the C-section birth of her son. In recent years, she has also become a part-time caretaker for her mother, who had a stroke.

Her recollection of how the school reacted to all of her challenges is very different than what the district attorney laid out. Instead of offering her help, Peoples said, the officials at Shayla’s elementary school tended to stonewall her or be suspicious. There were several times where it felt as though the school didn’t believe her when she said Shayla was not well enough to attend school, Peoples said. School officials were opaque when she asked if they needed more doctors’ notes, she claims. Peoples said she even asked for some of the resources that the district attorney would later claim she turned down — like a peer mentor for Shayla — and that the school wouldn’t communicate. The school began counting Shayla as absent without an excuse just a few days after they rejected one of Peoples’ requests for medical accommodations, Peoples said.

Today, Shayla is in high school. She’s been in the school choir and band. There are just as many days when she is in too much pain to go to school or can’t go because she is hospitalized. But Shayla’s new school works with Peoples to accommodate her needs, and as a result, Peoples’ legal troubles over truancy are behind her.

It wasn’t a victory as much as something Peoples survived. “I lost time with my son” and Shayla, she said. “I lost life. I lost me.”

Jessica Schulberg contributed reporting.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kama...ressive-prosecutor_n_5c995789e4b0f7bfa1b57d2e
 

MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator
Is A Joe Biden Kamala Harris Ticket In The Works?


Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris may be the perfect match to take on President Donald Trump in 2020, according to the Congressional Black Caucus 2020 Democrats primary field. Details: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/0...
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
POLITICS
Family Affair: Maya Harris Is Painted as the Face and Political Ice Breaker for Big Sister — and Presidential Hopeful — Kamala

hjiyjwpshkvpwuoikztd.jpg

Maya Harris, sister of and campaign
chairwoman for Democratic presidential
hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris, onstage at a
forum in Los Angeles, June 2018
Photo: Emma McIntyre (Getty)

Family is a common fixture along the campaign trail of many a political candidate, but few earn the aspirational moniker of being a candidate’s “Bobby Kennedy” as Maya Harris, younger sister of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris has among some political watchers.

According to a Politico profile, Harris — who serves as campaign chairwoman as well as chief adviser and political icebreaker for her big sis — is among that rarest of political relative: a supremely competent and experienced one more than well-qualified for the position she holds.

“Everyone is used to [politicians’] relatives that are doofuses,” Neera Tanden, head of the Center for American Progress, told Politico. “[But] [w]hen you have a relative that is competent and capable, what does that mean?”

It means, according to Politico, having someone on your team, like Maya Harris has been for her sister, who can be effectively involved in every aspect of a campaign.

As Politico notes of Harris:

A regular presence on the trail, Maya has been involved in virtually every facet of the race, from soliciting donors and recruiting the most diverse staff of any Democratic hopeful, to helping draft policy and talking up early-state politicos. ...

Maya is often the first point of contact for her sister in early states, where officials and operatives said she frequently touches base to gauge the lay of the land.

Her sister’s campaign is not Maya Harris’ first time at the dance.

Maya Harris was an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and would likely have served in a Clinton administration had she won the White House, Politico reports.

The Stanford-educated lawyer and progressive activist who became a mom at 17 also headed the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and helped edit manuscripts of Michelle Alexander’s best-selling The New Jim Crow about the need for criminal justice reform.

Of her sister, the presidential hopeful and U.S. senator representing the state of California told Politico:

“I think most people who know Maya will tell you she’s one of the smartest people they know. The fact that she has volunteered to work on this campaign at such a high level, and she’s exactly who she’s always been—she works around the clock and she’s probably the hardest, if not one of the hardest working people on the campaign—I feel very blessed.”



https://www.theroot.com/family-affair-maya-harris-is-painted-as-the-face-and-p-1835341726
 

Rembrandt Brown

Slider
Registered




Kamala Harris, Seeking a Campaign Jolt, Defends Record as Prosecutor
By Astead W. Herndon
June 9, 2019
NY Times

WEST COLUMBIA, S.C. — Senator Kamala Harris of California has, for months, faced criticism from activist Democrats who have said her record as California attorney general was at odds with her progressive reputation.

But on Saturday, as Ms. Harris seeks to reinvigorate her presidential campaign, she went on the offensive, laying out a robust defense of her record as prosecutor and decrying what she called “self-appointed political commentators” who fail to understand the complexities of criminal justice.

“There have been those who have questioned my motivations, my beliefs and what I’ve done,” Ms. Harris said in a speech in South Carolina. “But my mother used to say, ‘Don’t let people tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.’ So that’s what I’m going to do.”

In the speech, Ms. Harris cast herself as a change agent from within the system.

“It matters who is in those rooms,” she said. “I demanded we reject the false choice that said you’re either tough on crime or soft on crime. Instead, I said we must be smart on crime.”

Ms. Harris burst onto the presidential stage with an announcement before a crowd of 20,000 in her hometown, Oakland, Calif., an early show of force in a race that began without a clear front-runner. She has fallen in recent polls, however, which has triggered concern within her campaign and among her supporters.

But those close to Ms. Harris say they are confident she is finding her stride. On Sunday, at a dinner for Iowa Democrats that several presidential candidates will attend, Ms. Harris will revive her focus on President Trump, according to an aide, and argue that she is uniquely positioned to “prosecute the case” against him. Her speech Saturday got several ovations among the older black crowd that gathered for the annual N.A.A.C.P. Freedom Fund dinner.

Ms. Harris was the first black woman to serve as California attorney general and the second black woman to serve in the United States Senate. The speech made a vigorous case for the power of racial representation, and she frequently used “we” to refer to the black community. Ms. Harris argued that because of her identity, background and experiences, her mere presence in the state’s law enforcement systems helped make them more just and equitable.

Government needs “people who bring the context, awareness and life experience to the job, to make the system more just,” she said.

In addition to a more direct defense of her prosecutorial record, Ms. Harris has talked more explicitly about Mr. Trump in recent months. As the campaign has edged along, she has more explicitly rejected the language of “structural change” that defines the more leftist candidates and increasingly cast herself as a policy pragmatist in the tradition of Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Helen Rosamond-Saunders, a 73-year-old retired teacher, said Ms. Harris’s identity as a black woman gave her a special connection with black voters in South Carolina.

“It gives us, as black women, a special opportunity to support someone with the same goals and experiences that we have,” she said. “Now we need to step up to the plate.”

Katie Davis-Hill, 67, said she liked when Ms. Harris talked directly about Mr. Trump.

“She’s awe-inspiring,” Ms. Davis-Hill said. “We now have someone who thinks he’s above the law, but with her as a prosecutor, she knows what someone who isn’t telling the truth looks like.”

In Democratic events this presidential cycle, even at those for other candidates, Ms. Harris is typically mentioned as a candidate who generates significant interest. She has repeatedly drawn sky-high television ratings for cable news town halls.

But she has also been accused of relying too much on her identity and biography, particularly in a race in which all Democratic candidates, including white ones, are talking more specifically about race.

Her campaign recently announced a major summer investment in Iowa staff, after Democrats there openly wondered if Ms. Harris had done enough grass-roots organizing to succeed in the state. New Hampshire Democrats have also questioned whether Ms. Harris has visited the state enough.

In South Carolina, where Ms. Harris has appeared at more campaign events than any other Democratic candidate has, she received a rousing ovation whenever she assailed the president.

The voters she was courting are also being wooed by former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic front-runner at this early stage. Part of her goal was to show she can best argue the case against Mr. Trump.

“We’ve got to hold this guy accountable by prosecuting the case in front of the American people against four more years of this administration,” Ms. Harris said to applause. “I’ve prosecuted a lot of cases. But rarely one with this much evidence.”
 

MCP

International
International Member
GettyImages-1126988607-MortgageCrisis-KamalaHarris-Politics-1552422106-e1552422286628.jpg


https://theintercept.com/2019/03/13/kamala-harris-mortage-crisis/

Kamala Harris Celebrates Her Role in the Mortgage Crisis Settlement. The Reality Is Quite Different.


Pretty much every major Democratic official involved in responding to the foreclosure crisis during the Obama years did an unforgivably terrible job. That’s how we wound up with 10 million families losing their homes, an unprecedented disaster that touched every corner of America and triggered the populist backlash we’re living through today.
There isn’t a particular individual to single out and blame for the party’s failure, and that’s not what this story is doing. Kamala Harris’s role in the affair was no more or less tragic than anyone else’s. But now that she’s running for president, Harris is not only eliding responsibility for her part in the failure, but claiming it as an outright success. That claim doesn’t withstand a moment’s scrutiny.
“We went after the five biggest banks in the United States. We won $20 billion together,” Harris said in her initial campaign address in Oakland, California. She has highlighted the settlement for years as an example of her record of taking on powerful interests.

Harris is referring to the national mortgage settlement, a massive deal made with Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Ally Bank (formerly known as GMAC) in 2012, when she served as California attorney general. And that settlement is best understood as a second bank bailout, protecting legally exposed mortgage fraudsters while doing little to prevent evictions. In fact, more families lost their homes as a result of transactions facilitated by the national mortgage settlement than those who got a sustainable loan modification to save them.
Equating a toothless settlement with a sufficient penalty for criminal fraud sets a meager baseline for what constitutes punishment, virtually ensuring subsequent crimes. If we will ever dismantle a system that delivers one set of laws for the powerful and another for everybody else, we must be honest about the glaring inadequacies of the past. Harris often uses the phrase “let’s speak that truth” as a throat-clearer in speeches. Well, let’s speak some truth about the national mortgage settlement.
Let’s first understand what the settlement was about. During the run-up of the housing bubble, banks acquired thousands of subprime mortgages and turned them into securities. They created trusts as repositories of the mortgages, with bonds flowing out to investors around the world. All of this produced explosive demand for new mortgages, hooking millions more with subprime debt and inflating the bubble that later popped.
Governed mostly under New York state law, the trusts had to receive the mortgages before a stipulated closing date, with no grace period after the fact. But banks simply didn’t execute the transfers, breaking the chain of ownership on virtually all securitized mortgages in the housing bubble years. As a result, mortgage-backed securities were backed by nothing.
When the collapse of the bubble ushered in a flood of mortgage defaults, the trust administrators lacked the legal authority to foreclose. In an industrial-scale cleanup, law firms, mortgage servicing companies, and third-party subcontractors fabricated, forged, and backdated documents to paper over the failed securitizations.

This cover-up was not infallible, and the subsequent chaos — foreclosures on homes with no mortgage, foreclosures on people who never missed a payment, and multiple companies seeking foreclosure on the same property — revealed the fracturing of a property records system that had served America well since the 1630s. Mortgage companies were also caught piling on illegal fees, pushing customers into foreclosure, and lying to borrowers seeking loan modifications. Eventually, this mountain of false evidence and fraud burst into public view. By the fall of 2010, the leading mortgage companies in America stopped foreclosing on people, because they couldn’t do it anymore legally.
The stakes couldn’t have been higher. Trillions of dollars in securitized mortgages were apparently corrupted; title insurance companies were refusing to insure them until the mess was resolved. Following the law on these loans would have wiped out most of the major banks in the United States. Law enforcers had the leverage necessary to end the foreclosure crisis by allocating losses from the crash equitably, while punishing those responsible to prevent routinized fraud and abuse from ever happening again.

These options were not just wild fantasies. Then-Federal Deposit Insurance Corp Chair Sheila Bair wrote up a proposal at the time to take down all delinquent mortgages to current value and have homeowners and banks share in the upside when prices recovered. Experienced prosecutors like Bill Black, who helped put nearly a thousand bank executives in prison after the savings and loan scandal, were devising methods to hold financial crisis actors accountable. A collection of housing advocates, expert analysts, foreclosure victims, and defense attorneys were demanding such meaningful resolutions and pleading with Harris and other law enforcement officials to join them.
But in that crucial moment, nobody bothered to investigate the breadth of the fraud and how many were affected, instead moving directly to negotiating what facsimile of a penalty would be tolerable to the banks. A 50-state foreclosure fraud task force was formed to be the vehicle to clean all this up and get the system humming again.

Harris wasn’t in office when negotiations commenced in the fall of 2010, and while she nominally joined the task force executive committee after her election as California attorney general, for her first several months in office she kept relatively quiet on the matter. She was not the first attorney general to break from the investigation; New York’s Eric Schneiderman and five other Democrats got there first, and Schneiderman largely led the resistance.
A coalition called Californians for a Fair Settlement formed (with Schneiderman’s help) to separate Harris from the negotiations. They jammed office phone lines with constituent calls, and eventually got Gavin Newsom, at the time Harris’s biggest potential rival in state politics, to sign a letter opposing the emerging deal. (Newsom has since endorsed Harris’s presidential candidacy; the two share campaign consultants.) A month of persistent grassroots pressure and challenges to her political advancement led to Harris’s dramatic break with the talks, after a day spent with bankers trying to salvage them.
When Harris departed in September 2011, the deal being discussed by the task force with five banks was for around $20 billion; the final deal, which she returned to in February 2012, totaled $25 billion. The Obama White House, which wanted to take action against banks in an election year, put extreme pressure on the dissident attorneys general and got them to roll over for a relative pittance. And even this headline number wildly overstates the penalty for the banks and the benefit for homeowners.
The national mortgage settlement only included $5 billion in actual hard dollars: $3.5 billion to the states, and another $1.5 billion in “sorry you illegally lost your home” checks for foreclosure victims. The checks totaled $1,480 each, barely a month’s rent in California. As for the state relief, Harris and her fellow negotiators never mandated that the money go toward helping homeowners. So, like many others, California Gov. Jerry Brown purloined most of the state’s $410 million share to fill holes in the budget. Years later, private litigants sued the state for robbing the settlement fund and won, but the state has yet to return the money, years after it could have done much good.
When Harris talks about how she “won $20 billion” for the state, she isn’t referring to those hard-dollar provisions. She means the consumer relief portion of the settlement, which were credits given to banks for assisting struggling homeowners with their mortgages. The credits were lower than the raw dollar figure, but Harris always highlights the higher number. In addition, banks could modify loans they serviced on behalf of investors, who took the actual hit. This means that banks paid much of their fine with other people’s money.

Of the $20 billion Harris touts, nearly half of it, $9.5 billion, came in the form of short sales, in which homeowners sell their properties for below the mortgage balance without having to make up the difference. That can be helpful to someone’s credit score, but it results in losing the home, the exact opposite intention of the settlement. And because California is a “non-recourse” state, lenders are prevented from seeking mortgage balances from borrowers after a home sale anyway.
In 2013, Harris’s predecessor, Sen. Barbara Boxer, got a ruling from the Internal Revenue Service that short sale forgiveness in California represented no material value to borrowers. In other words, this supposed “gift” for homeowners from Harris’s settlement totaled $0.00.

Another $4.7 billion of relief in California involved forgiveness of second mortgages like home equity lines of credit, which were deeply delinquent and “essentially dead,” according to mortgage experts. That forgiveness did not prevent lenders from pursuing foreclosure on the same families over their primary mortgages. And banks were getting credit toward their total for something they’d have had to do anyway: writing off debt that would never be collected.
So over 70 percent of Harris’s $20 billion settlement either removed people from their homes or canceled unrecoverable debt. A little less than 33,000 California families actually got principal reductions on their primary mortgages, the most sustainable type of relief.

Sadly, California made out better than the rest of the country. Nationwide, while the settlement’s architects promised 1 million principal reductions, only 83,000 received them. Set against the millions of foreclosures in this period, to call it a drop in the bucket is generous. And praising Harris for making the best of a shameful deal is faint praise indeed.
Harris has noted a tension between exacting adequate punishment for mortgage crimes and delivering speedy relief to homeowners. But nearly 16 months elapsed between the initiation of the 50-state “investigation” and the settlement, and none of that time was actually spent investigating. The actual relief for homeowners was totally inadequate.
For the banks, the settlement was cause for celebration. Despite being caught red-handed in a litany of abuses, they paid off their penalty by either using other people’s money or performing routine functions. The actual impact made barely a dent in their profits. And they got a broad release from prosecution, putting their intense legal exposure behind them.
Needless to say, no bank executive went to jail for these crimes. In exchange for agreeing to the settlement, Schneiderman got to co-chair an overhyped federal-state task force that would allegedly serve as the real vehicle for criminal accountability. (Harris also wanted the gig, but Schneiderman out-maneuvered her for the position.) The task force wound up being a repository for existing cases, issuing no criminal subpoenas and merely securing more weak settlements.
Harris initiated a “mortgage strike force” to prosecute individuals, but it only brought a handful of cases, and the ones her campaign touts as triumphs were against penny-ante “foreclosure rescue” scams, not the bankers who maneuvered homeowners into foreclosure in the first place. Harris passed up the opportunity to charge OneWest Bank, then chaired by current Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, with what her own investigators called “widespread misconduct” in state foreclosure cases.
Overall, the national mortgage settlement was a blight on this country, a tragic missed opportunity to rebalance the unfair burden thrown on homeowners for a financial crisis they did not cause. The architects of the settlement should be embarrassed by the very mention of it. If this is what we hold up as justice, then we have none.
Surely Harris must have better things in her record to talk about. She authored the California Homeowners Bill of Rights, which gave borrowers more protections against foreclosure, although attorneys have questioned its spotty enforcement (one major mortgage company had never even heard of the Homeowners Bill of Rights, years after its passage). And she did hire an aggressive settlement monitor, Katie Porter, who got personally involved in cases and delivered better outcomes for homeowners; Porter is now a first-term member of Congress.
But Harris is specifically praising herself for the national mortgage settlement, and that’s just appalling. Letting the biggest banks in America get away with the largest consumer fraud in American history is nothing to celebrate. It’s more deserving of an apology, for abandoning vulnerable Americans in their hour of need and damaging the noble cause of equal justice under law.
 

MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator
BOTS SUSPECTED OF SPREADING TWEET CLAIMING KAMALA HARRIS ISN'T BLACK ENOUGH
BY JASON MURDOCK ON 6/28/19 AT 11:44 AM EDT









Loaded: 100.00%


HD
Warren Slams Trump During Visit To Florida Migrant Detention Center: 'We Must Speak Out'
SHARE
TECH & SCIENCEKAMALA HARRISDEMOCRATIC DEBATEBOTSTWITTER


A tweet claiming Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is "not an American black" went viral yesterday—and some believe it was given a boost by bots.

A mass of duplicate messages was pushed by accounts on Twitter after the senator commented on her race during the Democratic debate yesterday. The tweet, penned by a political commentator, said Harris is "half Indian and half Jamaican" and alluded that she was "robbing American Blacks... of our history."

The same evening, the surge of tweets was highlighted by Twitter user Caroline Orr—a behavioral scientist who regularly discusses the topic of online disinformation. Orr shared a series of images which appeared to be sharing Ali Alexander's viral tweet verbatim or pushing a similar narrative.

"What a weird coincidence that a group of accounts, starting with Ali, decided to tweet the exact same thing about Kamala Harris within minutes of each other tonight," Orr noted. "It's everywhere and it has all the signs of being a coordinated/artificial operation."

Alongside images of the tweets, which also went viral, she added: "Efforts to attack Kamala Harris' race have been around for a while but a huge volume of tweets pushing this manufactured narrative appeared tonight right after Kamala pointed out that she was the only black woman on stage."





Caroline Orr@RVAwonk

What a weird coincidence that a group of accounts, starting with Ali, decided to tweet the exact same thing (verbatim) about Kamala Harris within minutes of each other tonight. #DemDebate2


24.4K

11:43 PM - Jun 27, 2019

12.6K people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy






Caroline Orr@RVAwonk

A lot of suspect accounts are pushing the “Kamala Harris is not Black” narrative tonight. It’s everywhere and it has all the signs of being a coordinated/artificial operation. #DemDebate2


7,705

12:22 AM - Jun 28, 2019

5,380 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy


Sen. Harris appeared on stage beside some of the biggest rival candidates from her own party yesterday, including Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Kirsten Gillibrand.

On stage, in comments that sparked the viral tweet, she referenced herself as "the only black person on this stage" and attacked Biden's political record on race and segregation.

"I would like to speak on the issue of race," she said. "This is an issue that is still not being talked about truthfully and honestly. There is not a black man I know, be he a relative, a friend, or a co-worker who has not been the subject of some form of profiling or discrimination."

In a tweet yesterday, Harris wrote: "There was a little girl in California who was bussed to school. That little girl was me." Alexander responded: "Stop appropriating our history."

As reported by The Washington Post, Harris was previously forced to address her race after memes started to spread online about her heritage earlier this year.

They all largely focused on how the senator spent some high school years being educated in Canada while noting her father is a Jamaican immigrant and her mother is a Tamil Indian.

In March, during an interview on popular "The Breakfast Club" podcast, Harris directly took on the issue when talking about a meme which claimed she was "not African-American."

"I'm proud of being black," Harris told the hosts, as reported by CNN at the time. "I was born black. I will die black, and I'm not going to make excuses for anybody because they don't understand." She said similar tactics had previously been used by opponents against President Barack Obama.

At its core, it was the argument made by Alexander's viral tweet yesterday, which he said had spiked in popularity—and bot-like activity—after being noticed by Donald Trump Jr.

"Her conspiracy makes no sense," he wrote, referencing Orr.

"I tweet something. Don Jr retweets it. Bots following his account steal my content. Somehow... Russia! Now, I'm getting death threats. I'll be sharing these with the Twitter team." Alexander later published a video response in which he elaborated on his arguments about Harris.

The issue of bots—which are typically designed to amplify a message—dominated the political discourse in 2016 in the run-up to the presidential election as analysis increasingly suggested that Russia had been attempting to meddle in U.S. politics using social media platforms and co-ordinated leaking.
A January 2017 report published by the Director of National Intelligence suggested Russia not only used cyberattacks and espionage, but also "paid social media users or 'trolls.'" In January this year, Cnet reported that Twitter confirmed bots with links to Russian retweeted Donald Trump upwards of 470,000 times between September 1 and November 15, 2016.

Donald Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to request for comment. An email for comment sent to Sen. Harris was not immediately answered.

kamala-harris.jpg

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) speaks during a television interview after the second night of the first Democratic presidential debate on June 27, 2019 in Miami, Florida.CLIFF HAWKINS/GETTY
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Harris continues post-debate surge but Biden still leads polls


Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) continued to rise in polls following her breakout debate performance last week, jumping into a near tie with former Vice President Joe Biden in a Quinnipiac University survey released Tuesday. The poll found that 22 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters backed Biden, while 20 percent backed Harris.

In last month's poll, Biden had 30 percent and Harris had 7 percent. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) trailed with 14 percent and 13 percent, respectively.

A Washington Post-ABC News survey released Wednesday told a different story. Given a list of the 22 Democratic candidates:

29 percent of respondents said they supported Biden for the Democratic nomination;

Sanders got 23 percent; and

Harris and Warren had 11 percent.​


Source: NBC News, The Washington Post


.
 

muckraker10021

Superstar *****
BGOL Investor
WashPost_S.jpg


Kamala Harris grew up in a mostly white world.
Then she went to a black university in a black city.

When anyone challenges her racial identity, the presidential candidate points to
her four years at Howard University.
SFMLRJ6-QHZHWPCGE5-GSHOAGMH4-1.jpg


SEPT. 16 2019 | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/16/kamala-harris-grew-up-mostly-white-world-then-she-went-black-university-black-city/

Kamala Harris wanted to go to a black school. That’s what black folks called Howard University in the early 1980s when Harris was a teenager considering her future.

Harris, she would say later, was seeking an experience wholly different from what she had long known. She’d attended majority-white schools her entire life — from elementary school in Berkeley, Calif., to high school in Montreal. Her parents’ professional lives and their personal story were bound up in majority-white institutions. Her father, an economist from Jamaica, was teaching at Stanford University. Her mother, a cancer researcher from India, had done her graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where the couple had met and fallen in love. And Harris’s younger sister would eventually enroll at Stanford.

Harris wanted to be surrounded by black students, black culture and black traditions at the crown jewel of historically black colleges and universities.


“When you’re at an HBCU,” Harris says, “and especially one with the size and with the history of Howard University — and also in the context of also being in D.C., which was known forever as being ‘Chocolate City’ — it just becomes about you understanding that there is a whole world of people who are like you. It’s not just about there are a few of us who may find each other.”

Students were drawn to Howard, once called the “black Harvard,” because of its legacy. They believed in its conservative values of racial uplift and personal responsibility. A generation of post-civil rights movement children, whose college choices were hindered only by their grades and finances, picked Howard for a lot of reasons, but all of those reasons touched on self-identity — on how they saw themselves moving through a predominantly white world.

At Howard, Harris would be studying in the same classrooms as Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, Stokely Carmichael and Amiri Baraka, striding past the law school that educated Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall and civil rights activist Vernon Jordan.

It was where Harris could become the woman that her mother always knew her to be: unquestionably, simply, black.

KAAEJZHMTFDUBCFTC72-IKHH7-BE-1.jpg


XHG6-FC3-X4-FGC7-KHRXFTEPPTCFE-1.jpg

TOP PHOTO: Howard University, founded in Washington in 1867, is considered the crown jewel of historically black colleges and universities. (Photo by Kate Patterson for The Washington Post) LOWER PHOTO: Like many other students, Harris was drawn to Howard because of its legacy. (Photo by Kate Patterson for The Washington Post)

“Her mother was Indian,” says Lenore Pomerance, who was a close friend of Shyamala Gopalan, “but in the ’60s, you were either black or white. There was no real distinction between Caribbean or Indian.”

“Howard would be a place to solidify her identity as a woman of color,” Pomerance says.

As Harris campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination, Howard is central to the 54-year-old senator’s personal narrative and her political identity. To those who see her white husband, question her time in California as a prosecutor in a criminal justice system that disproportionately punishes people of color and wonder about her empathy for black men, Howard is her rejoinder. It’s her knowing nod to black voters, her character witness for anyone who would say that her personal heritage is disconnected from the story of African Americans and this country’s lineage of slavery.

“When people challenge her blackness, I always say, ‘If she went to Howard, it means she’s one of us,’ ” says Howard grad and Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong. “She comes from there. No one should challenge her blackness.”

Or as alumni say in an elliptical call-and-response: H-U! You know!

Only hours after announcing her candidacy in January on “Good Morning America,” Harris stood at a lectern at Howard where she took questions from reporters. It was a homecoming as political tableau, with Harris telling all who were listening that the university is “one of the most important aspects of my life.”

She touts her membership in Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the oldest of the historically black sororities and one that was founded at Howard. Sorority sisters organize on her behalf and vouch for her at get-to-know-you sip and sits. She is one of them, even if they mispronounce her name. (It’s KAM-ala.) Howard is a talking point.

“I became an adult at Howard University,” Harris says in an interview. “Howard very directly influenced and reinforced — equally important — my sense of being and meaning and reasons for being.”

A world of black abundance
Harris was 17 when she arrived at Howard her freshman year. Friends remember her big earrings and red lipstick. Her dark hair, clipped into curly layers, framed her face. She was a cool girl with honey-colored skin. She was disarmingly warm with a boisterous laugh — the same one that punctuates her campaign speeches.

Cramton Auditorium, the site of freshman orientation, was worn and shabby, as were many of the facilities. But the attraction to Howard, founded in 1867, was not the splendor of its lecture halls. Howard was people and inspiration. It was just-us, unvarnished straight talk to a generation of whom much was expected because at long last anything seemed possible.

Parents didn’t send their children to Howard to become revolutionaries — to upend the system. They sent them there to learn how to excel in spite of it.

At freshman convocation, Dr. Leon Howard Sullivan, the activist pastor of Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia, who fought for what has been described as “conscientious capitalism” addressed the incoming class of 1986: “The whites might run this country, but they don’t own it,” he told them. Then Sullivan, who died in 2001, hammered home the importance of self-reliance: “Blacks cannot depend on the white man because he has crossed us too many times already.”

I became an adult at Howard University. [It] very directly influenced and reinforced — equally important — my sense of being and meaning and reasons for being.
-Kamala Harris


Harris was surrounded by first-generation college students, but also the black elite, children of professionals who had attended predominantly white schools. They’d been the only black cheerleader-theater-nerd-brainiac in the student body. Before a lot of these teenagers came to Howard, blackness was narrowly defined. Howard gave them a wide-ranging view of themselves long before popular culture offered up “Black-ish,” the Shonda Rhimes universe or the splendor of Wakanda.

There were African American students from Los Angeles with their roller skates and shorts, hip-hoppers from New York, middle American preppies and wealthy Nigerian students who saw 1980s Reaganomics as a boon to their entrepreneurial aspirations. The campus teemed with the visual cacophony of thousands of young people all jockeying for primacy in a conversation about all the different ways of being black.

All of it awakened Harris to the empowerment that comes from being part of a multitude.

“It was more, for me, about the numerosity than it was the diversity,” Harris says. “I grew up in a community where there were many representations of diversity. Going to Howard, there were so many [black people]! And they’re all in your age group, in your phase of life.”

As a kid, Harris had always been one of the few — a test case, as well as a foreigner. During the first Democratic debate in June, Harris recalled how she’d helped integrate Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley when she was bused from her modest neighborhood to a wealthier, whiter part of the city. In her recounting, Harris was a first-grader in pigtails, a leading character in the grand social experiment of diversity by school board mandate.


ZXTREOAHE5-CFNNHD4-NKXW63-PDA-1.jpg
XVJB7-SWGXNGTFKCUQI45-AOO7-NQ-1.jpg
OYV6-IET2-AZFUZFM3-UYKDL2-TXSQ-1.jpg

Harris attended mostly white schools in Berkeley, Calif., and Montreal. (Courtesy of Kamala Harris) Harris's mother, Shyamala, an immigrant from India, was 25 when she had her baby girl. (Courtesy of Kamala Harris) Harris's father, Donald, an immigrant from Jamaica, holds her in April 1965. He was studying for a doctorate in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. (Courtesy of Kamala Harris)

Harris told the story as political gamesmanship — to underscore how wrong she thought rival Democrat Joe Biden had been on busing 50 years ago. Her voice cracked under the weight of the issue’s complexity: There is an individual cost to social progress, one that is virtually unknowable.

Harris’s personal stories about race are emotional but spare. Impressionistic. They are her stories but really, they could be the stories of an entire generation. H-U! You know! A sentence begins, then stops, then trails off with a “Well, I mean ...” What sort of brief exposition can she give when a full history lesson is really what’s required?

On the hustings, she repeats the tale of the neighbor’s child who told her, and her younger sister Maya, that she couldn’t play with them because they were black. There were the times when her mother, the scientist, was dismissed as a maid when they were shopping. In an interview with The Washington Post, she tells an anecdote about an unnamed journalist who asked her why she’d ever choose a black school over the Ivy League.

She sounded a bit exasperated. Maybe indignant. Definitely impatient.

How did you respond, senator? “Well, I mean.”

To paraphrase Morrison: Going to a black school doesn’t limit one’s education — it expands it.

At 12, Harris and her sister moved to Montreal with their mother. Her parents were divorced and Gopalan had a teaching position at McGill University and a research post at the Jewish General Hospital in a city that was nearly all white. Harris struggled to learn French at a public school, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, near the hospital.

At Howard, she was finally part of the majority. At Howard, the story of black Americans was not relegated to a single African American Studies department. It was central to everything. A truth became clear to her: “It is not a niche to be black in America.”

Harris threw herself into a world of black abundance, into a place where there was a constant drumbeat of exceptionalism.

Alumni boast about a Howard swagger. They see it in Harris now — in her impatient questioning as a senator, in her tone of voice as a candidate that can read as confident, cocky and condescending all at once.

Fierce, poised and ‘pulled together’
Harris’s first dorm was an off-campus apartment building leased by the university. Eton Tower, just off Thomas Circle, was in the city’s prostitution zone. In the wee hours, Washington’s dysfunction played out on the streets. And in the 1980s, the drama was operatic.

Twenty-six percent of the university’s mostly black neighbors lived in poverty. The city was ensnared in a crack epidemic and becoming the country’s murder capital — a title it would claim when violent crime peaked in 1991.

Harris’s energy wasn’t focused on what ailed the city or its complicated politics. Her passions and activities centered on the kind of person she wanted to be — not the kind of world she wanted to legislate.

She ran for freshman representative on the liberal arts student council, but she wasn’t one of the campus’s leading young politicians. She was a skilled debater, but being on the debate team was an intellectual pursuit, not a civic one. She joined the bus loads of students who rallied against apartheid in front of the South African Embassy. Melanie Flowers marched alongside Harris.

“When they started arresting students that day, we looked at each other and thought, ‘Okay, this is a pivotal point.’ I had to decide: If I got arrested, it was a one-way ticket home to Houston,” Flowers says.

NHQ2-YO564-FCFJIE2-HNIWE5-D7-BI-1.jpg

As a Howard freshman, Harris and classmate Gwen Whitfield attend a protest demanding an end to apartheid and calling for divestment from South Africa. (Courtesy of Kamala Harris)

This was years before “woke” became a righteous declaration, decades before black Twitter outrage and the emergence of cancel culture. Success within the system was still a laudable act of subversiveness — whether as an investment banker, a corporate lawyer or a district attorney.

Flowers and Harris didn’t get arrested. But they kept protesting.

Harris built enduring female friendships at Howard — relationships that as an adult have been nurtured across hundreds of miles and despite political differences. The women of Howard were tenacious and dynamic — and comfortable in their glory. Howard impressed upon them the power of intellect, as well as the value of their own poise, charm and beauty.

At Howard, Harris has said, women could be “homecoming queen and a valedictorian.” Black beauty and intelligence were bound tightly in a complex web, one that reflected a history in which black Americans were derided as having neither.

The central grassy plaza known as the The Yard was a place for peacocking, especially on Friday afternoons, when Harris joined the parade of students wearing Ralph Lauren polo shirts, creased Calvin Klein jeans, silk blouses and high heels. Students showed themselves in vivid color at a time when they risked invisibility in the broader culture. Even now, Harris’s style is always “pulled together.” That’s the phrase favored by alumni. Pulled together. It’s considered and finished off: pumps, pearls, her hair just so.

Going to Howard, there were so many [black people]! And they’re all in your age group, in your phase of life.

-Kamala Harris


Harris was among a group of freshman women who caught the eye of the brothers from Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. The Kappas invited her to become a sweetheart. Founded in 1911, the Kappas are one of the “divine nine” historically black Greek letter organizations. The sweethearts were the brothers’ helpmates on community projects and when planning parties.

Through the lens of 2019, the sweethearts seem silly and retrograde. But when Harris was at Howard, students delighted in pretty girls in tiaras wearing bedazzled sashes. Ebony magazine published pictures of the reigning queens of HBCUs, and that magazine had a place of honor on the coffee table of every grandma and auntie.

Being a sweetheart was good for one’s social life. It put you in the center of it all, including rip-roaring house parties with a soundtrack of new wave, go-go and rap. Harris threw her own parties when she’d housesit for Pomerance, her mother’s friend, who lived in Washington’s Kalorama Triangle neighborhood.

Sophomore year, Harris moved onto campus and into Slowe Hall. She and Karen Gibbs, her friend and dorm neighbor, often cooked dinner together in the building’s communal kitchen or shared the care packages of Indian meals that Gopalan would send. The two young women talked and talked about their future.

“Kamala was always concerned with your life goals,” Gibbs says. “She was always the realist.”

Harris, an economics major, wanted to pursue law and was considering public service. “I think she was clear she wanted to go into the district attorney’s office,” recalls Flowers.

On Sundays, Harris and Gibbs explored the city’s black churches. Gibbs recalls attending St. Augustine Catholic Church, founded by a group of emancipated blacks, and Metropolitan AME Church, where Frederick Douglass was eulogized, as well as New Bethel Baptist Church, where civil rights activist and congressman Walter Fauntroy was pastor.

To hear Harris speak in front of a large audiences now, when her voice rises for emphasis, you can hear the cadences of traditional black preachers — an almost lyrical quality that can turn an excoriation into something more poetic.

When Harris greets smaller crowds, the fiery hermeneutics are tamped down. Her delivery is punctuated by a neighborly “Good morning!” She offers a warm, teeth-visible smile even as she speaks of serious things. This is Harris as soror. Soror: Latin for sister; never to be mistaken for sorority girl; a lifelong member of Alpha Kappa Alpha.

A soror wields her poise like a spear; she can make sisterhood feel like a bomb threat.

J55-WTD5-IFRG6-JFG7-HYAABA6-MHU-1.jpg

S5-GRJBNDCZGA3-BNBI5-KCBVRB7-M-1.jpg

The 1986 Howard University yearbook. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

Harris and her Howard classmates. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)


AKA, founded in 1908, has a proud but complicated history. In its early days, it was plagued with colorism. (One alumna still remembers a flier from the 1980s that the sorority sent out inviting women to an event: “Come with your hair flowing.”) With about 300,000 members worldwide, AKA, with its signature pink and green, is represented in virtually every corner of culture.

Harris was one of 38 women who pledged AKA in 1986. She was a second-semester senior and Flowers, who became a member her sophomore year, was her sponsor. It was late to pledge a sorority, but Harris had spent much of her sophomore year focused on debate. Junior year, the chapter didn’t accept new members. Harris was intent on joining, she says, because “one of the people in my life who had a great deal of influence on me was my Auntie Chris, and she went to Howard University and pledged AKA,” referring to family friend Christine Simmons, a former chapter president, who died in 2015. “When I was a kid, I’d go to sorority events with her. I actually remember that one of my summer jobs when I was in high school was to sort through all of her papers and organize them. And every one of those papers was either pink or green.”

In the late winter cold, Harris stood shoulder to shoulder with her “line sisters” in front of Rankin Chapel. With their chins thrust upward and wearing matching coats, they’d recite a poem or be quizzed on sorority lore by senior members.

Harris didn’t have much time to enjoy undergraduate sorority life. But sisterhood and its benefits last a lifetime. In June, when Harris paid a campaign visit to Columbia, S.C., she was invited to stand on the side porch of a grand mansion, where ceiling fans swirled in the steamy air, to sell herself to potential voters — many of them black and most of them women. She was introduced by a fiercely poised soror who attested to Harris’s integrity by simply calling her a “sister of the ivy.”

DYDOLHIKI5-E5-DKP2-VLDCJTDSCE-1.jpg

Harris mingles at the Alpha Kappa Alpha Pink Ice Gala in Columbia, S.C., in January. (Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg News)

By the time Harris graduated from Howard in 1986, black centrism had notched more victories: Jesse Jackson had energized the campus with his presidential bid. His daughter Santita was a student there and that made the civil rights activist Howard family. Congress had created a federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. And Harris was headed to the UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. She would go on to become district attorney of San Francisco, California attorney general and now, her home state’s junior senator.

Then-Rep. William Gray (D-Pa.) addressed about 2,000 Howard graduates on a Saturday morning in May. “If you’re born black, you better be prepared if you are going to play on the court of life not to take time out and complain,” Gray said, “but to run faster, shoot straighter and jump higher.”

Looking back, Harris sees Howard as symbolic of the experience of black people writ large. Their story is diverse and complex — and so often untold.

“Some of the most robust, well-attended and vibrant classes were about the African diaspora,” Harris says. Learning about that history “is the richness of the experience of going to Howard University.”

“And it is sadly an experience that a lot of people don’t have.”

A shared language

Less than 24 hours after Harris said her piece on that "Gone With the Wind” porch in Columbia, S.C., a drum line greets the candidate as she descends the escalator into the dreary bowels of the Metropolitan Convention Center. Teenagers from Lower Richland High School, with bass drums holstered to their chest, boom out a greeting as she makes her entrance at the South Carolina Democratic Convention. The day will be a long blur, with speeches from 21 presidential candidates; might as well start the morning with an adrenaline shot of attention.

Harris, in an ecru plaid suit and understated necklace, still loves to dance. She claps and sways to the gritty rhythm as it pounds through the corridors.

A second drum line waits down the hall, in a small meeting room half-filled with volunteers. A group of bright-eyed munchkins from Killian Elementary School rat-a-tat-tat a welcome on snare drums as Harris steps onto a mini-stage.

“You guys are so good,” she coos in a high soprano. “Look at our young leaders! Can we applaud our young leaders? Oh my goodness!”

The kids are de rigueur. The drum lines are campaign showmanship. But the basses and snares also acknowledge the band traditions of HBCUs, where the drums don’t just speak — they extol and brag. They’re a language shared by Harris and this state’s black voters who possess outsize clout in the Democratic nomination. And Harris wants to make something clear: She’s a proud graduate of Howard.

It’s a black school.


DUSNSUIZMBBNFF57-BKJSNAC7-BE-1.jpg

Harris speaks to supporters at a meet-and-greet campaign event in South Carolina in June. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
 

muckraker10021

Superstar *****
BGOL Investor
WashPost_S.jpg


Kamala Harris Gets Personal

453-NYOG4-ZYI6-TINFCYVYVHE4-UI-1.jpg

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) stands ahead of her address to an NAACP banquet on Saturday in Charleston, S.C.

Sept. 23 2019 | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/23/harris-naacp-you-need-someone-like-me-inside/

Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) has built her career on a model of inclusive, progressive change. She tells voters she became a prosecutor so she could change the system from the inside. However, she has rarely described herself as an insider on behalf of the African American community. But her address at the Charleston, S.C. NAACP Fund Banquet on Saturday shows that’s changing.

At the onset of her campaign, Harris was criticized as not sharing enough of herself. While she has touted her education at Howard University and raised her experience being bused to school as a young girl, her presidential campaign has stressed universality and inclusion. Her “3 a.m. agenda" has stressed that what keeps us up at night — medical bills, housing, our kids’ education — does not depend on whether one is a Republican or Democrat. She routinely states that “we have so much more in common than what separates us.”

That reticence, by necessity, has receded. Voters demand a level of candor and intimacy from their presidential candidates. To both define her message and defend her record, she has had to explain her tenure as a prosecutor and rebutted claims that she was a cog in the machine of mass incarceration. She’s been obliged to share stories of her experience as a prosecutor comforting mothers whose children have been shot and killed and in instituting anti-bias training for police officers.

Moreover, as the campaign has progressed, Harris has more overtly emphasized her connection to the African American community and posited herself as African Americans’ advocate in the halls of power. This was especially noticeable in her speech Saturday. She spoke of herself as standing on the shoulders of African American giants such as Thurgood Marshall and told the crowd, “We need soldiers in every phase, layer and trench of the movement for social justice.” There is a need to pair outside advocacy with the hard and “frustrating” work of insiders, she argued. To sustain change and promote progress, she said, “We must elect and lift up people to lead who are also immersed in our community, who represent us and our experience, and who know the deep flaws within the systems we serve.” She added, “We need to run into the fire … extinguisher in hand.” In short, it matters for black Americans to have black Americans in power, on the inside.

Who better to knock down “the systemic barriers to racism,” she posits, than someone who understands that system but also has a deep understanding of the challenges facing the African American community as only a member of that community can? We now see her make the explicit case that the outcomes she obtained — e.g., getting jobs for young, low-level drug offenders — were a reflection of her understanding and attachment to the African American community.

For Harris, the address marked a level of candor and earnestness about her identity as an accomplished, African American woman that we have not regularly seen on the trail. In a time of “overt racism,” she presented herself “as only the second black woman elected to the United States Senate and as a serious and top-tier candidate for the president of the United States.”

One can be cynical and say she is more vividly identifying as an African American candidate with an eye toward the critical South Carolina primary and the need to win over African American voters who heavily favor former vice president Joe Biden. However, it would be foolish for Harris to ignore her own identity, her own career and her own experience as she asks voters to take a chance on a first-time candidate for president, a woman still in her first term in the Senate.

All presidential candidates must personalize themselves. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) talks about her Okie upbringing on the “ragged edge” of the middle class. Biden is "Middle-Class Joe,” and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is the gal from the heartland. Perhaps in fully inhabiting her role as an African American female trailblazer and a progressive insider, Harris’s will find the focus and clarity she needs.
 
Last edited:

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
‘OH, I LOVE KAMALA’
Kamala Harris Is Running Out of Time
Tuesday’s Democratic debate may be her last best chance to make her case.


Sophia A. Nelson

The Daily Beast
Published 10.14.19


191013-nelson-kamala-tease_giyliv

opinion
Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast/Photos Getty

Never mind asking if America is ready for her—it appears that the Democratic party is not ready for her.
The “her”, of course, is the powerful, smart, savvy 54-year-old black female senator from California who knows how to land a punch.
It’s hard to remember that power now, as Kamala Harris has fallen behind South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttiegeg and even former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke in some polls. This is the same Harris whom 22,000 people cheered for when she announced that she was running for president this past Martin Luther King Day.
 

muckraker10021

Superstar *****
BGOL Investor
question-mark.png
wtf.jpg
wtf.jpg

bloomberg-logo.jpg

Kamala Harris’s Offices Fought Payments to Wrongly Convicted
1200x-1.jpg


Jeffrey Taylor | October 14, 2019
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-offices-fought-payments-to-wrongly-convicted

Jose Diaz was exonerated after serving almost nine years in a California prison for two sexual assaults he didn’t commit. But the office of then-Attorney General Kamala Harris wasn’t ready to let him off the hook.
Diaz was convicted in 1984 of rape and attempted rape. He was paroled in 1993, became a registered sex offender, and began the work of proving his innocence. It took 19 years for his conviction to be reversed -- and two more years for the State of California to grant him compensation for the time he was wrongfully imprisoned.

Diaz’s battle with Harris’ office began in 2012 when a judge reversed his conviction. As state attorney general, her staff vigorously resisted his claim for compensation and tried to make him re-register as a sex offender, despite a formal ruling in April 2013 that he was innocent.

The Diaz case is one of a series of battles Harris’ prosecutors waged -- in both the offices of San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general -- to resist innocence claims, often using technical timeliness or jurisdictional arguments, lawyers and innocence advocates say.

Bending Toward Justice
“The goal is justice,” said Gerald Schwartzbach, Diaz’s lawyer. “The goal isn’t just rules, regulations and procedures. They penalized an innocent man with technical arguments. To me that’s fundamentally contradictory to the whole purpose of the criminal justice system.”

Harris is now a U.S. senator running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination on the notion that she is a “progressive prosecutor,” threading the needle between law-and-order toughness and a protective instinct for those who need it. Harris told ABC News recently that she became a prosecutor “because I just have a very strong and natural desire to want to protect people, and in particular our most vulnerable.”

A Harris campaign aide said she was unaware of the Diaz case while it was being litigated by her office, and that it’s rare for an attorney general to be made aware of cases before the state compensation board.

Multiple documents in the case appear on Harris’ letterhead and were signed by staff members with the notation under their names, “For Kamala D. Harris, Attorney General.”

Distrust Lingers
Whatever her involvement in the Diaz case and other innocence claims, actions by Harris’ offices -- carried out in her name, by people working on her behalf -- have left some voters and advocates distrustful. Criminal justice advocates are critical of her handling of wrongful conviction cases, in particular, saying her offices resisted at least five such claims despite compelling evidence of innocence.
“Kamala Harris should have known” about the Diaz case, said Lara Bazelon, an innocence advocate and law professor at the University of San Francisco. “If she truly was not aware that these specious and risible arguments were being made in her name, that is a failure of management.”
It wasn’t just Diaz.
  • Harris’ district attorney’s office repeatedly delayed responding to the innocence claims of Maurice Caldwell by filing for extensions as Harris ran for attorney general in 2010, keeping Caldwell in prison for more than a year despite evidence that someone else had committed the murder for which he was convicted, according to court records. A judge admonished Harris’ office for the delays and said they might warrant sanctions.
  • A state appeals court judge criticized Harris’ office for falsely claiming that the only eyewitness against Jamal Trulove in his murder case feared for her life, making Trulove seem more sinister than he was. The judge said the story was “a yarn” and “made out of whole cloth.” Trulove was convicted, but later exonerated after six years in prison.
  • The California attorney general’s office under Harris resisted the innocence claim of Daniel Larsen by arguing that he hadn’t filed his petition for release in a timely fashion, and also contested his request for compensation after he was exonerated. Larsen had been sentenced to 27-years-to-life for possession of a knife under California’s “three-strikes” law.
Harris’ presidential campaign spokesman, Ian Sams, responded to questions about those cases by pointing to reforms Harris enacted.

“Kamala has fought to give ex-offenders a second chance ever since she created one of the nation’s first major re-entry programs, ‘Back on Track,’ in San Francisco, which helped put people in jobs not jails,” Sams said in a written response.

“Of course, she wishes she could’ve gotten more done,” Sams added, “but she fought to clear the state rape-kit backlog in her first year to ensure evidence is available in cases and, in the Senate, she’s introduced a bill to increase pay for public defenders to improve the quality of defense counsel for individuals in their cases.”

Sams didn’t respond to an email asking whether she was aware of or personally involved in the Caldwell, Trulove or Larsen cases.
Criminal-justice reform advocates praise some aspects of Harris’ record. As San Francisco district attorney, for instance, she resisted calls to seek the death penalty for a man who killed a police officer. As attorney general, she required agents to wear body cameras and created implicit-bias training for law enforcement officers.

Fighting Compensation
After Diaz’s conviction was vacated in September 2012, Harris’ office sent him a letter telling him that he no longer had to register as a sex offender, as he’d been doing since his parole in 1993. “The DOJ has updated its records and a notification concerning this termination action has been sent to the law enforcement agency that last registered you,” said the document on Harris’ letterhead.
Diaz then filed for compensation, a standard practice in states to pay wrongfully imprisoned people, for some of the earnings they missed.
Both the state compensation board and attorneys working for Harris vigorously challenged Diaz’s right to any money, arguing that he hadn’t obtained a formal judgment of acquittal -- and that the court that reversed his conviction lacked proper jurisdiction.

Offender Registry
The following April, Diaz says, Harris’ office told him that, in fact, he must continue to register as a sexual offender -- although by that time he had obtained a formal judgment of innocence -- because he’d been released on parole before he filed the petition to vacate his conviction.

Filled with legal citations and precedents, the letter concludes: “Therefore, you are required to continue to register as a sex offender in California.” The letter is signed by a staff member in the sex offender tracking program “For Kamala D. Harris.”
That barred Diaz from coaching his children’s sports teams, he said in an interview, and was a problem when he was looking for work. It also meant that he would continue to be subject to unannounced police visits to his home, as had been happening for 19 years, he added.

Diaz said he believes Harris’ office was trying to intimidate him out of seeking compensation.
“There’s no question in my mind,” Diaz said. “When I received that letter, I was so upset.”

Jurisdiction Questioned
Throughout much of 2012, David Angel, a Santa Clara County assistant district attorney who supervises his office’s conviction integrity unit, investigated Diaz’s persistent claims that he didn’t commit the two sexual offenses for which he’d been convicted. After multiple interviews, including consultations with the victims, Angel concurred.
Angel said he was surprised when Harris’ office fought a judge’s ruling vacating Diaz’s conviction by arguing that Diaz’s defense lawyer hadn’t filed the petition for release in a timely fashion and that the court lacked proper jurisdiction.
“That’s when I called the AG’s office,” Angel said, declining to say who he spoke to. “I told them, ‘I find it hard to believe that you are trying to block what the elected DA of Santa Clara County has called an exoneration.’” Her office withdrew its opposition, he said.

Morally Wrong?
But Harris’ office continued to fight Diaz’s right to compensation for almost a year. Documents filed by Schwartzbach detail filings and arguments both the compensation board and the attorney general’s office used to try to block the claim.

In October 2014, more than two years after his conviction was vacated, Diaz was awarded $305,300 for his almost nine years in prison. The requirement to register as a sex offender was also eventually dropped.
Two experts on prosecutorial ethics were critical of the methods used by prosecutors working for Harris in innocence cases, saying some of the tactics were morally wrong and risked compromising justice.

“The knee-jerk reaction is ‘Oh no, we can’t let someone out on a habeas petition or give them compensation for their time in prison.’ They don’t like to lose, and they see a concession as losing,” Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who’s now chair of ethical advocacy at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said of Harris’ office and the Diaz case.

Culture Clash
“The sex-offender registration thing is really indefensible,” said Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham Law School in New York and a former federal prosecutor who was chairman of the American Bar Association’s criminal justice standards committee.
“The idea that some innocent person should have to labor under the branding of a sex offender for the rest of their lives because they didn’t meet the technical requirements, that’s just wrong,” Green said.
Newly-elected attorneys general, Green said, often find a certain culture and set of practices in place in the offices when they take charge. “If you start to overturn convictions others obtained, it doesn’t make you popular with your staff,” he said. “Prosecutors’ offices have an important duty to exonerate wrongly convicted people, just as they do to do justice for those who are guilty. But historically, that wasn’t viewed as part of the job.”
Some other wrongful conviction cases handled by Harris’ offices were also focused on technicalities and timeliness, but sometimes the lack of timeliness was on the prosecutors’ side.

Lost Time
In the Maurice Caldwell case, Harris’ DA’s office filed for multiple extensions rather than responding to his innocence petition, causing Caldwell to spend an extra year in prison before he was exonerated, said Linda Starr, co-founder of the Northern California Innocence Project at the Santa Clara University Law School.

Caldwell had been convicted of murder in 1991 in the fatal shooting of a woman during a botched drug deal. After doubt was cast on the lone eyewitness whose testimony led to his conviction, the innocence project and a private investigator located Marritte Funches, a man already serving a life sentence in Nevada for another murder, and he confessed.

Harris was running for California attorney general when Caldwell filed his petition for release, and by the time San Francisco Superior Court Judge Charles Haines reversed his conviction, she’d been elected. The district attorney’s office’s slow response earned a written admonishment in the judge’s order.

Flawed Case
“The court finds the delay in filing the return to be egregious, and possibly deserving of sanctions,” Haines said.

“If Kamala would have stopped this in 2009 or 2010, I wouldn’t have been in for the extra years,” Caldwell said in an interview. “I would have been able to come home and bury my mother.”


A judge declared in 2014 that false statements made by a prosecutor working for Harris about the fears of the only eyewitness against Jamal Trulove had likely prejudiced the jury. For that and other reasons, including questions about the competence of Trulove’s original lawyer, the judge overturned Trulove’s conviction, remanding the case for a new trial. Trulove was acquitted in a second trial after his lawyers introduced ballistics and other evidence that cast doubt on the witness’ story.

Concealed Knife
Harris’ attorney general’s office tried to keep Larsen in prison under California’s three-strikes law for possession of a concealed knife found during a fight outside a suburban Los Angeles bar. Claims had emerged that someone else had been carrying the weapon and there were concerns that Larsen’s trial lawyer was incompetent.

Harris’ office also contended that Larsen’s arguments were too late. “A federal habeas petition filed even one day late is untimely and must be dismissed,” the office said. After Larsen was released, Harris’ office successfully campaigned against compensation for the more than 13 years he was imprisoned.

Jose Diaz, meanwhile, says he still struggles with the trauma of having been wrongfully convicted of sexual assault and forced to register as a sexual offender for months after his exoneration.

“What her office did was wrong, and the buck stops with her,” Diaz said.
 
Top