Politics means compromise -- sometimes to your roots, but has the first female
vice president in U.S. history overshot? This is the shady side of Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris'
journey to political prominence initially began after she graduated
from The University of California’s Hastings College of the Law - with a JD in 1989.
She famously attended Howard University for her undergrad degree The future vice president took
her first job as a deputy district attorney in Oakland, California in 1990, serving until 1998.
But Harris' career may have started in earnest when in 1994 she met the powerful California
politician and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who was, quote, "a notorious womanizer," according
to the San Francisco Weekly. Harris was 29, Brown 60 and married, although, according
to the debunking website Snopes, he had been estranged from his wife for more than a decade.
He was powerful in bay-area politics, and the two began dating. Brown was also allegedly corrupt,
his office under investigation by the FBI, and Harris eventually dumped her aging lover.
Still, when she ran for District Attorney in 2003, Brown put his weight behind her anyway.
Harris won, but, according to Politico,
"Critics — including her opponents — were bemoaning cronyism at City Hall."
Once in office, Harris threw Brown under the bus.
The ambitious young politician declared her benefactor all but dead, saying,
"His career is over; I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing."
Politico branded Harris as, quote, "ruthless."
Harris has been spinning a seemingly
apocryphal childhood yarn for years that goes something like this: When she was a toddler
in Oakland, California, she was separated from her parents at a march. Young Kamala was found,
but fussing, and according to Harris' retelling in an interview with Elle, her mother asked her,
"'Baby what do you want? What do you need?' And I just looked at her and I said, 'Fweedom.'"
Harris told versions of this tale in her 2010 book Smart on Crime as well as her
2019 book The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, according to the New York Post.
She giggled her way through the anecdote on late-night TV with Jimmy Fallon as well.
"And she said, 'Kamala, what do you want?' And I said, 'Fweedom.'"
However, observers have pointed out a remarkable similarity to a
story that Martin Luther King Jr. told Playboy during the civil rights era.
In 1965, King recounted the story to Playboy, saying,
"I will never forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl,
seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her
mother. [...] 'What do you want?' the policeman asked her gruffly,
and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, 'Fee-dom.'"
While the similarities in the stories can't be ignored, Snopes remains undecided on whether
it's outright plagiarism, stating that Harris claims to have no direct memory of the incident,
but rather has simply repeated a story told to her by her mother.
Politicians
love to pretend to be cooler than they are. Kamala Harris's democratic successors did it,
too. Bill Clinton made his first big splash on the national scene in a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses,
blowing out a saxophone solo to "Heartbreak Hotel" on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992.
But Clinton also claimed that while he'd tried marijuana, he didn't inhale.
During Harris' run for executive privilege in 2019, the public's view of this stinky
little weed had changed dramatically and the then-aspiring POTUS was endorsing legalization.
Speaking on The Breakfast Club amid fits of laughter, she said,
"It was a long time ago, but yes. I just broke loose."
Harris claimed her experimentation was in college,
and when one of the interviewers asked her who she listened to while high, she laughed again.
"Definitely Snoop. Tupac for sure, for sure."
Well, not for sure. According to Newsweek,
critics quickly pointed out that Harris graduated from Howard University in 1986,
five years before either rapper released a debut album. Her defenders claimed Harris was just
confused by cross-talk, and was actually answering a more general question about artists she likes.
Harris' opponent in the Democratic primaries, Tulsi Gabbard, had a different,
and perhaps more important grievance with the segment, saying that Harris jailed over
1500 people for marijuana violations and then laughed when she was asked if she ever smoked.
During Harris' failed bid for the Democratic
nomination in 2019, in which her much-hyped campaign collapsed before the first caucus,
she offered up an ambitious plan to, quote, "overhaul the criminal justice system,”
according to Politico. Her sweeping plan, the article said, called to end federal mandatory
minimum prison sentences, do away with both the death penalty and solitary confinement,
and to phase out for-profit prisons and cash bail.
But Harris' top-of-the-ticket campaign may have imploded, in part, due to her own previous
stances on criminal justice. According to The Week, Harris, quote, "sometimes" embraced her
tough-on-crime record. But perhaps in light of the ascendant Black Lives Matter movement, and
the push to reallocate resources from the police to other social services, the former top cop,
quote, "seemed ashamed of her own tough record as DA and attorney general."
In one interview on ABC News in 2019, she said she protected the, quote,
"most vulnerable" as a prosecutor.
"A large part of my career as a
courtroom prosecutor was handling cases that affected crimes against women and children."
Part of the criminal justice system Harris and activists
now want changed is one that imprisons minorities at a disproportionate rate
for minor drug offenses, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
But according to Mercury News, as attorney general of California, Harris oversaw
1,900 convictions related to marijuana. She also, quote, "fought to keep people
in prison even after they were proved innocent," according to Vox,
and further defended California's death penalty all while refusing to look into, quote,
"certain police shootings." Her work as a prosecutory still haunts Harris politically,
according to the Los Angeles Times. After all, no one put her in prison for smoking a joint.
In 1998, a fight broke
out in a parking lot in California's San Fernando Valley. Cops thought they saw a man,
Daniel Larsen, ditch a knife under a car. Larsen protested his innocence,
but also had two serious prior felony convictions, and under California's
harsh three-strikes policy, was sentenced to 28 years to life, according to The Atlantic.
The Innocence Project eventually took up Larsen's case. Turns out Larsen's trial
lawyer bungled it badly. The lawyer's most egregious error was that he never had the
knife processed for fingerprints. Sworn testimony from a retired cop
also later showed Larsen never had the knife — another man did. Larsen's attorney was
later disbarred for his incompetence and a judge ordered the state to retry Larsen or let him go.
Harris could've done just that. Instead, her office fought to keep Larsen locked
up — on technical grounds — because he hadn't filed his petition quickly enough.
Larsen spent two more years in prison, battling Harris' office. Harris' team eventually lost its
bid in appeals court to keep this innocent man behind bars, but that didn't stop her
from blocking all financial compensation due to Larsen for the wrongful conviction.
In 2019, Larsen, who spent over a decade in prison for a crime he didn't commit,
never saw a dime, and, quote, "now lives in a small garage and relies on welfare payments."
Speaking of innocence,
imagine being a poor family struggling with bills and truant kids in the tougher corners
of sunny but expensive California. Then imagine Attorney General Kamala Harris
tossing you in jail on top of it. That happened. Then she lied about doing it.
In a 2010 speech, Harris talked about prosecuting parents for truancy.
"And I believe a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime."
She doubled down in 2011 during her inaugural address as California DA, saying,
"So, we are putting parents on notice. 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 admits she personally prosecuted 20 families under this policy, according
to The Washington Post, but has repeatedly denied anyone went to jail. But that's not exactly true.
While no one in San Francisco went to jail for their child's truancy while Harris was district
attorney, she pushed for her anti-truancy policy to go statewide — which it did in 2011. The law
called for up to a $2,000 fine and a year in prison for parents of kids who missed more
than 10% of school days with no excuse. Dozens of families were charged under this law, and
though records aren't thorough, at least 7 parents went to jail under Harris' initiative. Her, quote,
"careful" claims to the contrary were given two "Pinocchios" by The Washington Post.
There is a deviously effective
technique in the debate world called the Gish Gallop. It's when you spew so many
falsehoods in such rapid succession that your interlocutor is put in the difficult position
of either rebutting you endlessly, or actually getting to their own point.
In Kamala Harris' 2020 Vice Presidential debate with Mike Pence, a question came
on the topic of delaying Supreme Court justice nominations until after an election.
Democrats favored this at the time, so Harris invented a, quote, "unsubstantiated" reasoning,
according to Factcheck.org, and ironically attributed it to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln
faced a similar nomination close to his own election, claimed Harris, adding,
"But Honest Abe said it's not the right thing to do. The American people deserve
to make the decision about who will be the next president of the United States."
Historians told the outlet that there's speculation to Lincoln's motive,
but that probably wasn't it, and there is no record of Lincoln saying what Harris
described. Harris, it seems, sometimes has a complicated relationship with the truth.
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