2020: A Vision of the Future: Kamala Harris

By Gaurav Varma

Regular Witherly Heights contributor and political enthusiast Gaurav Varma presents his opinions on the Democratic candidates who have announced their candidacy for president of the United States in the 2020 election cycle.

Kamala Harris is consistently polling as one of the top contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination. She was the district attorney for San Francisco and served as attorney general of California. In 2016, she became California’s Junior Senator. Most of her political experience comes from being a prosecutor; consequently, she has made criminal justice reform a defining part of her campaign. But her record on issues of criminal justice, as well as other issues, is mixed. On issues ranging from the death penalty to California’s Three Strikes law, for every positive reform Harris has instituted, she has seemingly worked to shore up injustices in the system.

An example of this dichotomy is that as the San Francisco DA, Harris did not seek the death penalty for Isaac Espinoza. Espinoza was convicted of killing an undercover police officer; at the officer’s funeral, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California advocated for his execution. Thanks to Harris’s principled stand, Espinoza is now serving a life sentence. However, despite her personal opposition to capital punishment and politically dangerous stand against it, as California Attorney General, Harris continued to enforce the death penalty and appealed a ruling that California’s death penalty system was unconstitutional. Those who would say Harris was just doing her job and had no choice would be ignoring her refusal to defend a proposition that banned gay marriage. Harris willfully continued to implement capital punishment when it was within her power to stop.

On mass incarceration, Harris was an effective reformer. In San Francisco, she established the Back on Track program, which provided young nonviolent first-time offenders an opportunity to participate in apprenticeships instead of going to prison. After winning her election for attorney general, she expanded the program across California. Yet she also fought to keep innocent people locked up on technicalities. For example, the Innocence Project proved Daniel Larsen was an innocent man and got his sentence overturned in part because his attorney was so incompetent (he was later disbarred). But Harris’s office fought to keep him imprisoned as he filed his petition for release after the deadline. The courts eventually reversed the original decision and allowed Larsen to go free.

Additionally, on California’s Three Strikes Law, Kamala Harris both reformed and caused harm. The law required anyone who committed three felonies go to prison for at least twenty-five years. Harris did not enforce this law for minor felonies when she was district attorney. But when there was a ballot proposition to codify what Harris was already doing into law, she opposed it.

One of the best parts of the presidential candidate’s record is in her aggressiveness in going after large corporations. In the years following the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis, California was engaging in settlement negotiations with the country’s five largest mortgage providers. Harris pulled out of the talks to prosecute the companies and ended up getting a much larger settlement than they were originally offering. She also secured a huge fraud settlement from a company caught cheating California’s poor and disabled persons’ insurance program and signficantly reduced the foreclosure rate by calling for a “Homeowners’ Bill of Rights.”

However, as with all of her successes, there are also significant drawbacks. Harris’s Mortgage Fraud Strike Force only prosecuted ten cases, and when prosecutors in her office discovered that OneWest Bank was illegally foreclosing on its clients, she failed to conduct an investigation. OneWest Bank’s then-CEO Steve Mnuchin, who now serves as President Trump’s Treasury Secretary, then donated to her Senate campaign in 2016. She was the only Democrat to receive a donation from him.

Nearly all aspects of Harris’s record have negative sides, but not all have accompanying positives. For one, when Harris was asked about marijuana legalization in 2014 after her Republican opponent for the California Attorney General election stated he was in favor of it, she laughed and said he was entitled to his opinion. She did the same back in 2012 when asked about marijuana legalization after the New York Times endorsed national legalization.

When a transgender inmate attempted to get gender reassignment surgery, Harris tried to block it from happening.

Harris attempted to dismiss a case against the state’s use of solitary confinement, a punishment tantamount to torture, in state prisons.

She endorsed a law that criminalized parents whose children were habitually truant from school. The program was panned for being ineffective and disproportionately harming low-income citizens.

She fought a case to legalize prostitution in California.

The bulk of Kamala Harris’s record has come from her past in law enforcement, but more recently her positions on a broader set of issues have emerged. She supports free college for families making under $140,000 per year; she has signed on to Senator Sanders’ Medicare for All plan; she supports a fifteen dollar minimum wage; and she was against the Trans-Pacific Partnership. On the surface she seems to be a progressive, albeit less so than other candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. However, as with many candidates who have only recently declared their support for policies made popular by Bernie Sanders in his 2016 presidential run, it remains to be seen if she truly believes in and is willing to fight for these policies or is simply supporting them for political expediency.

One issue where Harris is clearly more conservative than the rest of the field is on Israel. Despite the gross human rights abuses in Palestine that Israel is responsible for and the corrosive role the right-wing, pro-Israel group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee plays in American politics, Harris still spoke off the record at AIPAC last year. In 2017, she also spoke at the event expressing strong support for Israel.

Harris said, “I believe Israel should never be a partisan issue, and as long as I’m a United States Senator, I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense.” Meanwhile she merely pays lip service to the need for a two-state solution and has been largely silent on the illegal settlements in the West Bank. While ten Democrats, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling him to stop destroying a Palestinian village, Kamala Harris visited the far-right authoritarian leader in 2017.

Kamala Harris is a mixed bag. She has been a fighter for real reform in the field of criminal justice. But the marks on her record as a prosecutor, the potential insincerity in her progressive beliefs, and her views on Israel make her a poor candidate to lead the Democratic party in the 2020 election.

[Sources: jacobinmag.com, nytimes.com, vox.com, youtube.com, theintercept.com]