Thursday, February 28, 2019

Kamala Harris: Progressive?




The other day I saw that Joy Reid of AM Joy had a guest on her show strongly stating Kamala Harris would lose support for her Presidential bid from the black community.  The reason?  She has a white husband.  This guest said that she should dump him and get with a "strong black man" id she wanted that support.

This is utter nonsense.  The fact taht she's a black woman married to a white man has absolutely nothing to do with her qualifications, or lack thereof, for the office she's seeking.  The only thing that should be considered in deciding whether or not to support and vote for her, or anyone else, is how her record compares with her talking points.

When Kamala Harris first ran for the Senate a couple years ago, I liked her.  Here was a relatively young black woman who believed in law and order, and had done some good things to improve the California criminal justice system.  So I thought, "Fine, let's expand that to the federal level."  And she won that race.

But then, only a year and a half into her first term as a Senator, she started meeting with Hillary Clinton's money backers.  It looked like she being groomed for a run at the Presidency, and that she wanted to give it a shot.  So I began looking deeper.

At her CNN town hall, she said that she stands on her record.  So let's take a look at that.

She'd been a prosecutor, then headed the head of a big city prosecutor's office, and finally the California's Attorney General.  But what did she do in those positions?  What stands did she take?

She fought against a court order  to release non-violent offenders in order to combat prison overcrowding. Her stated reason? The state of California would lose all that almost free labor.

Most of those non-violent offenders were in for possession and/or use of marijuana, and most of those are minorities (read: black), many of whom she prosecuted. But she now claims she wants to decriminalize pot.

She talks about how DNA evidence needs to be used, but fought against defendants asking and begging for it.

She even defended the death penalty.

And then there's Steve Mnuchin. Her staff found a thousand bank fraud violations on him, and told her if they kept looking, they would find another thousand. But she decided not to prosecute. When asked, she claimed her staff made the decision. And now Mnuchin is Trumps' treasury secretary.

To be fair, she did accomplish some very progressive things as well.  These are shown in a New York Times article by law professor Laura Bezelon:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/kamala-harris-criminal-justice.html

She stands on her record.  Fine, she's entitled to do that.  But we, as voters, must look at that record as a whole. 

She claims to have been a progressive prosecutor, but her record is mixed on that, leaning more conservative than progressive.  Running against Bernie Sanders, Liz Warren and Tulsi Gabbard, she comes up short on any progressive score card I can imagine. 



© 2019 by Donald C. Rice Jr.