Kamala Harris

Her campaign slogan is, “TOUGH. PRINCIPLED. FEARLESS.” No one doubts “Tough.” And “Fearless” is a good bet. “Principled” is the puzzler. It’s quite likely true, but her own mother had a heck of a time with that one. Harris has an answer.

As explained in a sympathetic, but revealing, Atlantic article from May 2019,

Growing up at protests, Harris writes, she’d seen the mechanics of fighting for “justice from the outside.” That dynamic did not appeal to her. She wanted insider power, establishment power. “When activists came marching and banging on doors,” Harris writes, “I wanted to be on the other side to let them in.”

Her mother, Shyamala, who was more the “marching” type (her parents met in the civil rights movement), wasn’t so sure. But perhaps Kamala won that argument. Her mother had a bumper sticker that said something like: “Back off — my daughters are lawyers.”

The point to remember is that if Kamala has a principled approach to politics, it’s something conditional and strategic, something like “hold your cards close to your chest.” That’s what we need to understand. Did she take uncomfortable, cautious and even conservative positions only to protect herself while she climbed to the top?

Or did she take these positions because she agreed with them? Here’s why that’s such a puzzle (again according to the Atlantic):

As attorney general, she declined to support two ballot measures to end the death penalty. She declined to support making drug possession a misdemeanor. She declined to support legalizing pot. She declined to support a ballot measure reforming California’s brutal three-strikes law.

As California’s attorney general, she also successfully pushed for criminalizing the parents of truant schoolchildren as well as the children. Since she was the one who led this charge, which she knew from the start might get her in political trouble (and it did), this was not a case of her playing it safe! She really believed in this.

The same is true for her failure to back a measure reforming California’s worst-in-the-nation, three-strikes law. In 2010 she took a position to the right of her Republican opponent in the race for attorney general. And in 2012, when the measure passed with a 69% landslide majority, she was still refusing to back it. Surely “fearless” attorney general Kamala Harris did not do that out some fear of political reprisal.

So she may well have chosen a path inside the establishment so that she could “open the doors to the protesters” later. But this does not explain her tough-on-crime positions. She is pretty fearless, and she owns all those positions.

Criminalizing truancy was well-intentioned but …

Harris described her entry into truancy criminalization like this:

“I believe that a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime. So I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy.
Well, this was a little controversial in San Francisco. And frankly, my staff went bananas. They were very concerned because we didn’t know at the time whether I was going to have an opponent in my reelection race.”

She repeated this in many speeches. It was not a slip, it’s the truth. She and her staff were more concerned with her elections than with accidentally targetting innocent or helpless parents. Most of these were black or brown and most were mothers, not fathers.

She started down this path in 2004 when cracking down on truancy became a priority for the Bush administration (No Child Left Behind). And only started changing course in April 2019 — when it was becoming a problem for her presidential race.

She was falsely accused on one point

The Guardian newspaper claimed, “Harris looked at the problem of perpetual truancy and believed she ought to start locking up parents.” There have been many similar claims and they are totally unfair. Her goal was to use fines and jail time as a threat to get negligent parents to shape up and if necessary use available social services. She herself, avoided jailing any parents.

The problem is that her “huge stick,” as she called it, is a very blunt instrument. But being a prosecutor, she thinks like a prosecutor, even though she is well-intentioned. And most of our problems are not solved even by a good-prosecutor’s approach.

Her truancy law

During her race for attorney general of California, she championed a new statewide anti-truancy law which specified that:

Parents of chronically truant students could face a maximum penalty of a year’s imprisonment in county jail, a fine of up to $2,000, or both.

One of the first to be arrested under that law was Cheree Peoples whose 11-year-old daughter, Shayla, had missed 20 days so far that school year. The reason for this turns out to be that Shayla has sickle-cell anemia, an incurable genetic disorder, which frequently put her in the hospital. The Mayo Clinic notes that “Periodic episodes of pain, called crises, are a major symptom of sickle cell anemia.”

You might think, that such an obvious mistake would be quickly corrected. But according to the Huffington Post:

Peoples’ case trudged through the judicial system for two years. She had dozens of court dates, at least one every month, and at times it seemed as if the entire district attorney’s office was involved. Her case was passed among eight different prosecutors, including a recent transfer from the homicide squad.

Research says it doesn’t work

There have been many reports in the press about how this law gets abused or just goes wrong because of its prosecutorial nature. The problems run so deep that there seems to be no evidence that it does any good on average.

A 2011 study from the Washington State Center for Court Research compared high school students who received truancy summons with kids who had the same number of unexcused absences and similar grades, but who were not called into court. The students in court experienced more subsequent absences than the ones who avoided law enforcement; they also received lower grades, and were more likely to drop out of school or be charged with a crime.

Truth truth truth truth truth?

According to the Atlantic, If Harris’s campaign has a mantra, that’s it: truth truth truth truth truth. But as any lawyer knows, that’s worthless unless it’s “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” By that standard Harris’s prosecution of Joe Biden was not true.

She only said a few false things, but she left out key points which completely change the meaning of her accusations.

She was not “part of the second class to integrate Berkeley California, public schools.” She started busing in the middle of the seventh year.
For a year and a half when she could have been in the busing program, she was attending a Montessori school.
Joe Biden never opposed the kind of busing program she was part of (a voluntary community-based program, not court-ordered).
Only about 44 percent of blacks favored the court-ordered busing Biden opposed and about 48 percent opposed it.
Jim Baker, a black city councilman who would go on to become mayor of Wilmington DE, said he urged Biden to actively fight the busing plan — even if he had to work with racists. —Washington Post

The trouble is, prosecutors do not have to swear to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” So they’re just not used to that.