Could This Be Our Next President?

Born to a Jamaican-born Marxist economist who taught at Stanford University, and an India-born research scientist, Kamala Harris attended Howard University and served as president of the Black Law Students Association at San Francisco’s Hastings College of Law.   

In 1994, at the age of twenty-nine, she began dating Willie Brown, the married sixty-year-old Speaker of the CA State Assembly, considered to be one of the most powerful men in California politics. Brown appointed Harris to state commissions that did not require confirmation by the legislature. The State Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board paid Harris around $114,000 per year. A later appointment to the Medical Assistance Commission paid her about $99,000 per year. While filling these part-time board positions, Harris remained a full-time county employee.

The most important thing Willie Brown gave Kamala Harris was access to his vast network of political supporters and donors.  Even after ending their romantic relationship, the two remained allies and Brown would prove to be enormously helpful in her rise to political power.

San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan hired Harris to head up his office’s Career Criminal Unit.  After being passed over for the number two slot in the prosecutor’s office, Harris joined the city attorney’s office and decided to run against DA Hallinan. She regularly came a distant third in polls for that race, but with the influence of the Brown political machine, money from the super-wealthy of San Francisco began to flow into her campaign.  Although Harris had signed a pledge to adhere to the city’s voluntary campaign spending cap of $211,000, by the end of November she had raised $621,000. The San Francisco Ethics Commission voted unanimously to fine Harris $34,000, a record in city elections. There were also questions about donations Harris accepted from individuals with matters sitting before her at the city attorney’s office. Carol Langford, the head of the American Bar Associations’ ethics committee at the time said, “If your office sues someone and you take money from the defendant, that’s a conflict.”

In January 2004, Harris was sworn in as San Francisco District Attorney. One week later, the city opened an investigation into allegations that city workers were pressured to campaign for Harris and newly elected Mayor Gavin Newsom. No charges were ever brought.

During the campaign for DA, Hallinan had publicly stated that Harris would be unwilling to bring corruption charges against allies of Willie Brown, and her record as a prosecutor would prove him correct. Charges were dropped in a corruption case against Brown ally Hector Chinchilla, a real estate lawyer and head of the SF Planning Commission. Brown friend and donor Ricardo Ramirez ran a cement and concrete company hired by SF public works, which was determined to be using inferior concrete on massive projects where structural integrity was key, like the Golden Gate Bridge. Public works agency officials went public with the fact that Ramirez’s company had defrauded them, but he never faced charges for delivering substandard concrete. Caltrans said that they “couldn’t explain why they [prosecutors] hadn’t pursued charges.”

Harris often emphasizes her experience as a sex crimes prosecutor, but her handling of the widespread priest abuse scandal in San Francisco, and later in the state of California, raises many questions. Harris’ predecessor, Terence Hallinan, had prosecuted numerous priests on sexual misconduct involving children, and he had case files for even more prosecutions pending, which included extensive internal records from the SF Archdiocese.  

Hallinan’s office had discussed the public release of these archdiocesan documents. According to San Francisco election financial disclosures, large donations to Harris’ campaign rolled in from those connected to the Church’s institutional hierarchy, and once elected, Harris’ office buried the records. Victims’ groups were outraged by her actions, which ran contrary to her public image as a fighter for victims. Somehow Kamala Harris managed to serve as SF District Attorney and CA Attorney General from 2004 to 2017, without bringing a single documented case forward against an abusive priest. Compared to the number of cases brought in at least fifty other cities around the country, Kamala Harris’ astonishing display of inaction represents the ultimate form of leveraging power in the criminal justice system – choosing not to pursue criminal charges.

This pattern of selective enforcement of laws continued during her tenure as attorney general. A number of corporations who were represented by her husband’s firm, Venable LLP, had matters sitting on her desk. In March 2014, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into Herbalife, one of those companies, and Attorney General Harris’ office received more than seven hundred complaints about the company. After the company’s lobbying firm threw her a fund-raiser, Harris declined to investigate, and by August 2015, Venable LLP had promoted her husband, Douglas Emhoff, to managing director of their West Coast operations.

So how has Kamala Harris defined her role as Vice President?  

Harris was tapped early in Biden’s presidency to address the crisis at the US-Mexico border.  Many months later she made her first and only visit to the area, never meeting with the then-head of the Border Patrol.  Her epic failure on this assignment is evident, with more than 11 million illegal border crossings since she took office.  The Border Patrol union lambasted her saying, “If you were given a job . . . with the explicit goal of reducing illegal immigration, and then you sit around and do nothing while illegal immigration explodes to levels never seen before, you should be fired and replaced.”

Harris has made abortion rights the central piece of her political identity, with fiery speeches made at pro-abortion rallies, and planned visits to abortion facilities as part of her “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour. It appears that the one thing the Vice President is passionate about is fighting for the right to end the lives of babies in the womb.

As a US Senator and Vice President Kamala Harris has endorsed the elimination of private health insurance, has supported “Medicare for All” including those in the country illegally, has co-sponsored the “Green New Deal”, has promoted raising income taxes and taxing “unrealized capital gains”, has supported sanctuary cities and reducing or defunding police budgets, has compared ICE to the KKK and supported eliminating ICE and “starting from scratch”, has supported reparations for descendants of slaves, and would consider allowing convicted felons serving prison time or even on death row to vote.

Could this be our next President?