What you really need to know about Kamala Harris
Here are 10 things you probably didn’t know about California Sen. Kamala Harris, a likely Democratic presidential contender:
1) As a district attorney and attorney general, Harris pushed for a new statewide law that lets prosecutors charge parents with misdemeanors if their children are chronically truant. “We are putting parents on notice,” she declared. “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.”
2) Harris also has been a strong advocate of civil asset forfeiture. She supported a bill in California that would have allowed prosecutors to seize assets before initiating criminal proceedings — a power now available only at the federal level — if there was a “substantial probability” they would eventually initiate such proceedings.
3) In 2012, she submitted a brief supporting an illegal immigrant’s application for a law license. In 2014, the California Supreme Court ruled in the immigrant’s favor, even though the California State Bar’s rules consider committing a criminal act to be disqualifying.
4) In her first speech on the Senate floor, Harris declared, “An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.” She later avowed the belief that illegal immigration is “a civil violation, not a crime.” But entering the country illegally has criminal penalties, and reentry without permission after deportation is a crime — as is, in most cases, working in the US without legal residency, since it almost always involves some falsification of documents or lying on work forms.
5) In April 2018, Harris urged the Senate Appropriations Committee to “reduce funding for beds in the federal immigration system,” reject calls to hire more Border Patrol personnel and “reduce funding for the administration’s reckless immigration enforcement operations.”
6) In 2010, a California Superior Court judge declared that as San Francisco district attorney, Harris had violated defendants’ rights by hiding damaging information about a police drug-lab technician and was indifferent to demands that the lab account for its failings. The crime lab technician had been convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence in 2008; district attorneys are obligated to hand over to the defense information about prosecution witnesses that could be used to challenge their credibility. Prosecutors’ failure to disclose the information about the technician led to the dismissal of more than 600 drug cases.
7) In 2004, San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza was shot and killed by David Hill, a young gang member with an AK-47. Hill also shot another officer in the leg. Days after Hill’s arrest, then-District Attorney Harris announced that her office would not seek the death penalty. This prompted Sen. Dianne Feinstein to declare that, if she had known Harris was against the death penalty, she probably wouldn’t have endorsed her for DA in the first place.
8) Starting in 1993, Harris began dating Willie Brown, then the speaker of the California Assembly and later a candidate for mayor of San Francisco — a relationship that brought her in contact with many of the city’s political and financial movers and shakers. Early in 1994, Brown named her as his appointee to the state’s Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, a job that paid $97,088 a year. Six months later, he named her to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a post that paid $72,000 a year.
Into 1994, press accounts described Harris as Brown’s girlfriend. He was still married, and in his early 60s; she had turned 30. Once he was elected mayor in 1995, he broke up with Harris, and his wife appeared with him at his swearing-in. Asked by a reporter about what it was like to live with the future mayor, Brown’s wife responded: “Difficult.”
9) In 2009 and 2010, Harris contributed to the liberal blog Daily Kos, where she characterized the opposition to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as “bigotry and narrow-mindedness,” warned that Texas oil companies were “invading” California by funding efforts to repeal an initiative requiring reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and opposed Arizona’s since-struck-down immigration law, declaring that we “can’t afford to divert scarce local law-enforcement resources to enforcing federal immigration laws.”
10) In April, Harris made an appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” where the hostess asked, “If you had to be stuck in an elevator with either President Trump, Mike Pence or Jeff Sessions, who would it be?” Harris replied: “Does one of us have to come out alive?”
Jim Geraghty is senior political correspondent at National Review, from which this article was adapted.
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