Kamala Harris Joins the Race for President
The Democratic field for president has rapidly become more crowded since Elizabeth Warren announced her bid on the last day of 2018. San Antonio mayor Julian Castro and Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard are both in the mix now, and as of Monday morning, one more candidate joined the race: Senator Kamala Harris.
Harris is a first-term senator from California who made a name for herself as one of the savviest members of Congress. She garnered national attention for her combative questioning of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, when they both appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Only 10 U.S. senators have been black and only two of those, Harris included, have been women.) Over her career she has made the justice department institute racial bias training for police, was an ardent defender of Obamacare, and recently came out in support of single-payer health care.
Harris has her fair share of baggage, though. She went from a district attorney in San Francisco to California's attorney general, and her record as a prosecutor is troubling to many progressives. In The Atlantic, Hannah Giorgis reviewed Harris's memoir, Truths We Hold, writing:
Under District Attorney Kamala Harris, the overall felony-conviction rate in San Francisco rose from 52 percent in 2003 to 67 percent in 2006, the highest seen in a decade. Many of the convictions accounting for that increase stemmed from drug-related prosecutions, which also soared, from 56 percent in 2003 to 74 percent in 2006. As California’s attorney general, Harris pushed a punitive initiative that treated truancy among elementary schoolers as a crime for which parents could be jailed. In 2014, she attempted to block the release of nonviolent second-strike offenders from overcrowded state prisons on the grounds that their paroling would result in prisons losing an important labor pool.
Meanwhile, white collar and financial crimes faced relatively little scrutiny. Harris's consumer law division, for example, looked into OneWest Bank—which was then headed by the current treasury secretary and "foreclosure king" Steve Mnuchin—and found patterns of hyper-aggressive foreclosures and "widespread misconduct." The investigators pushed Harris to launch a full investigation, and instead she closed the case with no explanation.
Whether she decides to address any of these issues remains an open question, but from her remarks on Good Morning America, it sounds like her campaign will be leaning heavily on her experience as a prosecutor. (Her campaign slogan, for instance, is "Kamala Harris, for the people.") Still, no Democrat running in 2020 deserves a free pass, and it should be compelling to hear her defend the thornier questions her record raises, if she chooses to.
