The first seven months of the
Trump administration has seen an ever-changing coterie of high-profile
Democrats probing the possibility of launching a 2020 run to take back the
White House, from Joe
Biden and Corey
Booker, to Kirsten
Gillibrand and Deval
Patrick, and maybe even Hillary Clinton for a third time. The latest
name to join this carousel of political ambition is recently elected California
Senator Kamala
Harris. Her rise to the top of the 2020 shortlist has been long in
the making, with Democratic bigwigs recognizing her potential star power as
early as 2008, when she campaigned for Obama.
Harris’s rise has produced a
fiery debate among liberals and the Left. Leftists and progressives have come
out in strong opposition to Harris’s candidacy, with some declaring
#NeverKamala and some high-profile
Bernie Sanders supporters, such as National Nurses United executive
director RoseAnn DeMoro, making clear their lack of enthusiasm for her
candidacy. For some prominent liberals,
this pushback is simply the product of virulent racism and sexism among an
imagined (and non-existent)
all-white, all-male, Sanders-supporting base.
While most Harris-supporting
liberals wouldn’t go this far, there is deep
suspicion among some
Democrats that opposition to Harris is motivated by similarly
less-than-noble motives — namely, that it’s part of a project of poisoning the
well for any potential challengers of a Bernie Sanders or Sanders-like
candidacy in 2020.
In truth, there is much about
Harris’s long record as a public prosecutor in California — the vast bulk of
her career — that is up for legitimate criticism by any prospective 2020
Democratic voters.
Throughout her career,
Harris has
been called the
“female
Obama.” In reference to her race, this is lazy and arguably even
racist. But the comparison is apt with reference to her politics. Harris has
emulated the Obama approach, delivering a combination of some notable
progressive victories and pleasant rhetoric and a steadfast avoidance of
structural change — paired, in some cases, with far-from-progressive policies.
Where Credit is Due
First, the good. Harris’s
career has been laudatory at times.
The first test of Harris’s
principles came in 2004, after she was elected as San Francisco’s district
attorney (DA) while promising never to impose capital punishment. Less than six
months into her tenure, Harris defied a united chorus of voices — from the
city’s police chief and police rank and file, to Democratic senator Dianne
Feinstein — calling for the death penalty for a twenty-one-year-old who killed
an undercover police officer.
During the officer’s funeral,
two thousand officers gave Feinstein a standing ovation after a speech in which
she criticized Harris, who was also at the funeral. The state’s attorney
general and former senator Barbara Boxer (whose seat Harris has now taken) looked
for ways to circumvent Harris’s decision, but ultimately failed. Thanks in
large part to Harris’s steadfastness, the killer was spared the death penalty.
In other words, at the very
start of her career, Harris defied her own party, her city’s police department,
and endured public humiliation to defy reactionary demands.
Later, in 2009, Harris’s
Republican rival for attorney general attempted to use her anti-capital
punishment stance against her and turn the race, in his words, into “a
referendum on the death penalty.” Harris didn’t budge.
Harris has been a frequent
critic of the criminal justice system, an encouraging sign. She outlined her
philosophy in her 2009
book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safe,
the title of which has become a common
refrain for Harris. Her “smart” approach, according to the
book, involves focusing on “short-circuiting the criminal careers of offenders
much earlier,” “getting offenders out of the system permanently,” ensuring
“lower rates of recidivism,” and “investing in comprehensive efforts to reduce
the ranks of young offenders entering the criminal justice system.” One of
her suggestions was
to teach nonviolent inmates and some juvenile offenders skills for employment.
To that end, Harris supported
reforming California’s three-strikes law, refrained from seeking life sentences
for criminals who committed nonviolent “third strikes,” and in 2004 instituted
the Back on Track program, which put first-time offenders between ages eighteen
and twenty-four into eighteen-month-long city college apprentice programs,
which contributed to the city’s recidivism rates dropping from 54 percent to 10
percent in six years. She would later
order parole officers not to enforce residency restrictions
against sex offenders.
Over her time as DA and,
later, as California attorney general, she took a number of progressive
stances. She opposed the anti-gay Proposition 8, helped defend Obamacare in
court, supported an undocumented immigrant’s bid for a law license, sponsored legislation
that increased transparency around websites’ data collection, opposed California’s
despicable “shoot the gays” ballot initiative, and filed
a brief in the Supreme Court encouraging it to allow public
universities to consider race in admissions. Under her direction, the state’s
justice department adoptedbody
cameras, California police were made to undergo implicit
racial bias training, and her office received an award for accelerating the
testing of rape kits.
Harris also had a respectable
record of standing up to corporate malfeasance. She filed a
friend-of-the-court brief signed by thirty-one other state attorneys general in
2011 in a Supreme Court case looking to end the practice of drug companies
paying competitors to keep generic versions of their drugs off the market. In
2012, she set up a privacy
enforcement protection unit in the attorney general’s office,
which at one point fined a company for surreptitiously installing
spyware on its customers’ computers.
In 2011, she brought the largest
fraud settlement in decades against a company that had spent
fifteen years overcharging the state’s insurance program for the poor and
disabled. She reached a $6.5
million settlement with two former Countrywide executives over
predatory lending and called
for a Homeowners’ Bill of Rights, which led foreclosures
to plummet in the state and Daily Kos to declare
her “a bankster’s worst nightmare.”
Harris also has a strong
history of going after polluters. As district attorney, she created San
Francisco’s first Environmental Justice Unit and went after cases involving
illegal dumping and air pollution. As attorney general, she went after
companies including BP, Chevron, Comcast, Cosco
Busan, ExxonMobil,
and South
California Gas Company, with Cosco Busan agreeing to the largest
settlement of its kind for its 2007 spill in the San Francisco Bay.
With Trump in office, Harris
has become even more outspoken. She’s come out in support of single-payer
health care and free
college tuition for families earning less than $140,000 a year.
She’s a frequent
critic of Trump’s policies. In her short time in the Senate,
she’s put forward bills to end
the pay gap for black women and clarify
the rights of people detained at US ports of entry, and
cosponsored bills to raise
the federal minimum wage, close tax
loopholes for Big Oil, ban
agricultural use of dangerous pesticides, and stop new
oil and gas leases as well as the renewal of old ones in the Arctic Ocean.
Going by all this, Harris’s
record seems impressive. But it and, indeed, her commitment to her stated
principles, is less pristine upon closer inspection.
“Smart on Crime”
Much as Obama pursued policies
starkly opposed to his own rhetoric, Harris’s record is defined by policies
that undercut her proclaimed vision.
The death penalty is a prime
example. Harris deserves credit for refusing to execute a man while under
tremendous pressure to do so. But despite her vaunted personal opposition, she
never challenged the death penalty during her time as attorney general — and in
fact did the very opposite, actively working to keep it in existence.
When a federal judge ruled
California’s enforcement of the death penalty unconstitutional, Harris appealed what
she called a “flawed” decision. She would continue to defend the
death penalty as the case wound through the federal courts.
One might counter that it’s
the job of the attorney general to defend state law, regardless of her views.
Yet in stark contrast, Harris refused to
defend the anti-gay Proposition 8 in court, calling
it “a proposition that was found by a judge to be
unconstitutional.”
You can see this pattern in
Harris’s approach to criminal justice. Today, Harris talks a good game.
She attacked her
rival for Boxer’s senate seat for helping “fuel America’s mass incarceration
crisis by voting to send more kids to prison, build more prisons and ratchet up
mandatory minimums for nonviolent crimes.” She penned an op-ed about
the tragedy of female incarceration, pointing out the abuse women receive in
prisons, as well as prison’s economic costs to their dependents. She often
says that the question of whether one should be “soft” or
“tough” on crime is a false choice, and that one should instead be “smart” on
crime.
Yet Harris’s “smart on crime”
approach seems remarkably similar to a “tough on crime” one.
“Getting Smart on Crime does
not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes,” she explains in her
book. As her website outlines,
“Kamala believes that we must maintain a relentless focus on reducing violence
and aggressively prosecuting violent criminals.” Fittingly, when she became San
Francisco DA, the felony conviction rate rose from 52 percent to 67 percent in
three years.
In practice, Harris defended
California’s uniquely cruel three-strikes law, the only one in the country
which imposed life sentences for a third “strike” that was any minor felony.
She urged voters to reject Proposition
66, a ballot initiative that would have reformed the harsh law by
making only serious or violent felonies trigger life sentences.
Harris promised that if voters
rejected the initiative, she would put forward her own, different reform. But
Harris’s proposal was a tepid half-measure: it simply eliminated some third
strikes. Harris would later
support a different ballot measure that was identical to
Proposition 66, but continued to allow anyone previously convicted of murder,
rape, or child molestation to receive life sentences for relatively minor third
strikes (though it did also allow those with non-serious third strikes to
petition for re-sentencing).
Harris’s bullishness on three
strikes was unusual. When she ran for attorney general, her Republican opponent
actually ran to
her left on the issue. In fact, four years earlier, as the Los Angeles
County district attorney, he had proposed a reform of the law. Harris had not
supported it.
Sure, Harris had a reputation for
being one of the few prosecutors who held off on seeking life sentences for
nonviolent third strikes. But this meant little when leaving the law in place
meant future, more aggressive prosecutors were free to keep imposing unjust
sentences.
Fortunately, eventual reforms
to the law meant this never happened, though it was no thanks to Harris. In
2012 and 2014, California voters passed
two ballot initiatives that gave judges more discretion in
sentencing and retroactively scaled back punishment for certain low-level
crimes. Harris didn’t
take a public position on either,
claiming that taking a side would come into conflict with her duty to write the
ballot text. A fellow Democrat who had preceded her as attorney general called
the excuse “baloney.”
Harris’s commitment to harsh
punitive measures wasn’t limited to the three-strikes law. For all her recent
concern about the incarceration of women and its economic effects, as district
attorney, she successfully championed a
statewide version of an anti-truancy law she had put in place in San Francisco
that threatened parents of chronically truant children with as much as a $2,000
fine and a year in jail. By October 2012, two
mothers had been imprisoned under the law.
“We are putting parents on
notice,” she said in
her inaugural speech as attorney general. “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’s championing of the
measures was an outgrowth of what she described as a passion for the issue of
truancy that she had held since becoming San Francisco’s district attorney. But
for its part, the Los Angeles Daily News — in an editorial that endorsed her,
no less — argued that “it was hard not to conclude that Harris chose truancy as
an election-season focus because it’s an issue without much political risk.”
At the time, Harris was
pushing for statewide data collection on truancy, which she said would inform
future anti-truancy policies and was something she had first introduced in San
Francisco. Yet when the Daily News asked her what this data
collection in the city had shown, “she seemed not to know or have thought about
it,” the paper wrote.
Harris’s actions in the Daniel
Larsen case are particularly concerning.
The Larsen case was a travesty
of justice from start to finish. In 1999, when two police officers claimed they
saw Larsen, who had earlier in his life been convicted for burglary, pull a
six-inch-long knife from his waistband and throw it under a car, he was
sentenced to twenty-seven years to life under the three-strikes law supported
by Harris.
Forget for a second that the
sentence was unduly harsh for the crime in question. Police had wrongly
targeted Larsen for a search in the first place, and witnesses reported that it
wasn’t Larsen but the man he was with who had thrown the knife. In trial,
Larsen’s incompetent lawyer (who would later be disbarred) didn’t investigate a
single witness, nor present one in trial.
Eleven years later, a judge
reversed the conviction due to the lack of evidence and incompetence of
Larson’s attorney’s. Yet two years later, Larsen was still in jail. Why?
Because Harris, now a vocal opponent of mass incarceration, appealed the
judge’s decision on the basis that Larsen had filed his paperwork too late — a
technicality.
Tens of thousands of
people petitioned Harris
to release Larsen, and numerous civil rights groups similarly called on her to
do the right thing. But even when he was eventually
released from custody after fourteen years, Harris challenged
his release, and five months later Larsen was back
in court, fighting to stay out of prison for a crime he didn’t
commit.
Harris’s concern about mass
incarceration similarly failed to come up when California Governor Jerry Brown
reacted to a Supreme Court order to reduce prison overcrowding by announcing a
$730 million plan to move inmates to private prisons and vacant county jails.
One would expect Harris may have had some words of criticism, especially as
California’s senate president had an alternative, better plan that focused on
getting inmates mental health and drug treatment. But she was silent. San Jose’s Mercury
News criticized
her inaction, rightly pointing out that “she wrote a book
about” the issue.
Harris has also recently taken
up the habit of reminding
us that “the war on drugs was a failure.” Yet Harris’s record
on drug reform while attorney general is nonexistent.
She opted not to join in other
states’ attempts to take marijuana off the DEA’s list of most dangerous
substances. When Obama raided California’s medical marijuana dispensaries,
Harris put out an empty
statement. When asked about legalizing recreational marijuana in
2012, only a week after the New York Times endorsed national
legalization and less than a year before she started warning about the failure of
the war on drugs. Harris laughed.
As was the case with respect to the three-strikes law, her 2014 Republican
opponent ran
to her left on the issue.
The limits of Harris’s
approach are likewise evident in her actions on police shootings. She did back
a bill that required reports on officer-involved shootings to
be posted publicly online and mandated bias training and that justice
department agents wear body
cameras. But as district attorney, she refused to
hand over the names of police officers whose testimonies had led to convictions
despite the officers’ arrest records and histories of misconduct. As attorney
general, she also opposed instituting
police body cameras statewide and stood against a bill requiring her office to
investigate fatal police shootings.
Members of California’s
Legislative Black Caucus (who are fellow Democrats) criticized her
over the latter, as did Melina Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter activist and
professor of pan-African studies, who commented: “This is not the time for
timidity. … Martin Luther King said if you tell black people to wait, that
means never.”
These are just a few of
a large
group of civil rights advocates and activists who criticized
her on the matter, including San Francisco public defender Jeff Adachi and
Phelicia Jones, an organizer with the Justice for Mario Woods Coalition and a
former Harris supporter, who wondered “how many more people need to die” before
Harris stepped in, and accused her of “turn[ing] your back on the people who
got you to where you are.” Although Harris’s defenders have singled out a small
number of her critics who are white, complaining that
it’s “the same three people” criticizing of her, it’s not hard to find a range
of people who criticize her record, many of whom are people of color.
In fact, despite being
well-placed to reshape California’s criminal justice system, Harris has
something of a reputation in the state as a marginal figure on the issue. As
the Orange County Register put
it, she was viewed by some as a “too-cautious and often calculating
politician” who has avoided hot-button issues.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson,
president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, told
the Sacramento
Bee that Harris could’ve been “a more vigorous advocate for full
criminal justice reform” and that she was “unwilling to be big and bold.”
“Harris’s role has not been pivotal” in reshaping the criminal justice system,
the paper wrote. “The pyramid shook, but often it wasn’t her doing the
shaking.”
Harris tried to dismiss a
suit brought by California inmates over the state’s use of solitary
confinement, with her office insisting “there
is no ‘solitary confinement’ in California prisons” (despite this, the case
ultimately turned into a landmark
settlement that struck a blow against the practice). She tried
to block a transgender inmate’s request for gender reassignment
surgery. When a prosecuting attorney inserted a falsified confession into the
transcript of a defendant’s confession, committing what an appeals court called
“outrageous government misconduct,” Harris appealed the
case, arguing that it wasn’t “outrageous” because it didn’t involve physical
brutality.
One of the more egregious
blots on Harris’s record is her hostility to sex workers’ rights.
Harris fought
a suit brought by a sex workers’ rights organization to
legalize prostitution in California. But much worse was her hounding of
Backpage, an online classified website frequently used by sex workers, which
Harris brought
criminal charges against suspiciously close to her senate election, accusing
it of being “the world’s top online brothel.” The relentless
pressure eventually forced the website to shut down its adult advertising
section.
Backpage was by no means an
admirable organization — it was frequently used for child sex trafficking in
addition to ordinary sex work (although Lois Lee, who headed a shelter for sex
trafficking victims, called its
shutdown “a sad day” because it had been a “critical investigative tool” for
law enforcement to recover missing children and prosecute pimps). But it was
also a cheap, easy, and safe way for sex workers to find clients without having
to go on the streets or work with pimps. Its closure threw sex workers
into uncertainty
and peril.
“Kamala Harris pressured that
place to shut down, but she did not create any programs that are gonna help
California mothers take better care of their families with better economic
access to safe housing, education, health care,” one sex worker complained.
“Sex workers choose to do this work so we can pay for those things.”
Harris has at least shown the
capacity to move in the right direction on some issues. She recently penned
a New
York Times op-ed with
Rand Paul explaining how bail “disproportionately harms people from low-income communities
and communities of color,” calling for its reform or replacement (her and Paul
put forward a bill to do so). But as
late as June 2016 she was defending the constitutionality of
bail in court. By December of that year, she was arguing the opposite.
Not-So-Civil Liberties
Given Harris’s stance on
crime, it’s perhaps unsurprising that she was not always the most ardent civil
liberties defender.
It’s true that Harris ordered
California parole officers not to enforce blanket residency restrictions on sex
offenders. This order ended the unjust application of a law that in many cases
made it impossible for someone convicted of a sex offense to live anywhere, and
increased the homeless sex offender population by twenty-four
times in three years. (In addition to the barbarity of making anyone
homeless, sex offenders’ risk of reoffending rises dramatically with
homelessness, arguably, and ironically, making the public less safe.)
But she had only done so after
the state Supreme Court ruled the restrictions to be unconstitutional, and only
after she had appealed the
same decision by a lower court. Harris supported Jessica’s Law, the ballot
measure that instituted these rules, back in 2006. Similar to her stance on the
three-strikes law, her 2010 Republican opponent ran
to her left on this issue.
Around the same time,
Harris sponsored
legislation that would have banned sex offenders from using
social media sites like Facebook. The bill received much
criticism, not only due to concerns for privacy and civil liberties,
but also because it was ineffective — most sex crimes against children are
committed by people they know, and most adults who solicited sex from kids
online weren’t registered sex offenders. But as many pointed out, Harris was
sponsoring the bill the same year she was running to be attorney general.
Harris was also a big booster
of familial DNA searches, a controversial technique whereby investigators
compare a DNA sample to other samples in a DNA database to find possible
relatives, then use additional genetic testing and analysis to confirm the
match, all in order to solve crimes. Due to privacy concerns, the
technique hasn’t
been adopted in Canada, and was outlawed
in both Maryland and DC. Among the concerns are the
not-infrequent cases of human error in DNA evidence, the fact that familial
testing would disproportionately impact communities of color, the potential
revelation of family secrets, and the already existing instances of mistakes
being made with the technique.
California was the first
state to adopt the technique in 2009 under Jerry Brown, but
Harris eagerly kept it going. In 2011, she announced new funding to double the
amount of familial searches, telling
the LA
Times“California is on the cutting edge of this in many ways,” and that “I
think we are going to be a model for the country. I really do.”
In fact, California’s use of
familial DNA testing is particularly invasive, as the state allows the
collection and preservation of DNA samples from anyone who is arrested, even if
they’re not charged with a crime. The ACLU originally sued to block
California’s DNA collection when an Oakland woman had been arrested during a
San Francisco protest against the Iraq War and forced to give a DNA sample
despite not being charged with any crime.
Harris was likewise a firm
proponent of civil asset forfeiture, sponsoring
a bill to allow prosecutors to seize profits before charges
were even filed. Years before that, she opposed AB
639, a bill that aimed to reform asset forfeiture. The bill easily
cleared the state assembly, but was soon scuttled by a united wall
of opposition from law enforcement, with whom Harris was united.
There was also the case
of the Sikh man who was barred from working as a prison guard
because of his religiously mandated beard. Harris argued that his beard
prevented him from being properly fitted with a gas mask, thus disqualifying
him from the job, despite California’s corrections and rehabilitation
department’s regulations allowing guards to have beards for certain medical
reasons.
A number of civil rights and
legal organizations — including the ACLU of Northern California, the Asian
American Bar Association, and the Council on American Islamic Relations — wrote
Harris a letter pointing out this inconsistency. She argued that the medical
exemption only applied to guards who passed the mask fitting before the policy
took effect, although the man’s attorney said this was untrue.
Any future Democratic
president is going to inherit the now nearly sixteen-year-old “war on terror,”
which has already hollowed out many civil liberties protections for the sake of
security and has the potential to do much more. Harris’s record on the matter
as a prosecutor thus deserves careful consideration.
Settling for Less
Arguably the most significant
accomplishment on Harris’s record is her treatment of banks that were involved
in widespread foreclosure fraud.
It is clear this will be one
of the key selling points to any future Harris 2020 run, so it deserves special
attention. She touted her 2011 mortgage settlement deal in her 2012 DNC speech,
and at the 2016 California Democrats Convention, she was introduced as
someone who was “very tough on the banks when they try to foreclose on working
families.”
Harris’s actions on the issue
in many ways serve as a microcosm of her broader political agenda. The
foreclosure deal, while an impressive and landmark settlement, was also a
half-measure that delivered far less to the public than it seems at first
glance, ultimately failing to properly take the banks to task for their
criminality.
Obviously, credit where credit
is due: in September 2011, Harris pulled California out of nationwide mortgage
settlement talks with the five biggest mortgage servicers, a gutsy move that
won her praise from homeowner groups and involved defying Obama, her close
ally. Harris did this after meeting personally with the banks’ representatives,
who were offering California what she
called “crumbs on the table” and reportedlyasking
to be let off the hook from legal action over any misconduct they had
committed. Harris thought she could get Californians a better deal. She told
the banks, “I am going to investigate everything.”
At the same time, Harris’s
decision to pull out has to be understood in the context of the widespread
activism that pressured her to do so.
At the time, Harris was under
pressure from union leaders, other politicians, and housing rights activists.
As one member of the progressive coalition of groups put it, “It wasn’t like
she was some hard-charging AG that wanted to take on the banks” — rather, “it
took a lot of work to get her where we needed her to be.” Harris withdrew the
day after these groups sent her a letter, signed on by Lt. Governor Gavin
Newsom, a potential future rival, calling
the deal “deeply flawed” and “outrageous.”
The deal Harris got for
California was ultimately much better.
It provided
$18.4 billion in debt relief and $2 billion in other financial assistance, as
well as incentives for relief to center on the hardest hit counties. This is
particularly impressive when one considers the banks had originally only
offered California, the state hardest hit by the housing crisis and fraud, $2-4
billion.
Nonetheless, the settlement
was woefully inadequate. For one, while the $20 billion total sounds good, it
was a fraction of what the banks would have had to pay to compensate for all of
their malfeasance. For instance, investors had won
$8.5 billion in a settlement with Bank of America over mortgage
securities backed by faulty loans.
Secondly, the banks themselves
paid very little — only around $5 billion, with most
of the settlement involving the banks modifying loans owned by
others, such as pension funds, who had nothing to do with the misconduct that
necessitated the deal. In terms of direct financial relief, underwater homeowners
— weighed down by average debt of close to $65,000 each — received around
$1,500 to $2,000 each. One called
it “a slap in the face for a lot of us.”
Moreover, more than half of
the $9.2 billion in principal loan forgiveness in the state went to second
mortgages, and many of those were already delinquent. While it did benefit
homeowners, it also meant, as one economist told the LA Times, that in
practice the banks “were writing off loans that were essentially dead.” A year
later, only one-fifth of the aid went to first-mortgage principal
forgiveness. And even at the end of this, just 84,102 California families had
any mortgage debt forgiven — far short of the 250,000 originally predicted.
On top of this, under the
deal, loans owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn’t
qualify for the debt relief. Given they were the
country’s biggest
mortgage holders, this meant even fewer homeowners stood to benefit
from the deal.
Harris explained that while
the deal was imperfect, she was forced to make do as the clock was ticking.
“Every day there are homeowners in California who will either receive relief so
they can stay in their home, or will be in the foreclosure process and
potentially lose their home,” she said. “And that always weighed heavily on my
mind.” Rob McKenna, one of the lead negotiators on the settlement said that “at
some point you have to decide that it’s more important to get relief to
consumers sooner than to get more through the court.” Similarly, journalist
David Dayen believed Harris
had “played a bad hand relatively well,” and that prosecuting would have taken
more time and a bigger coalition of prosecutors than she had at the time.
Still, there were numerous
critics. Writing in the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik savaged
the deal and what he called the “rosy self-congratulation” that
followed it, particularly the new foreclosure standards it imposed, which he
called a “big whoop.” “The provisions mostly require mortgage lenders and
servicers to comply with what I would have thought was already the law, which
prohibits, you know, criminal fraud,” he wrote.
“This settlement is yet
another raw demonstration of who wields power in America,” wrote Susan
Webber. “It adds insult to injury to see some try to depict it as a win for
long suffering, still abused homeowners.” “There’s virtually no benefit to
borrowers, and yet you give the banks credit for short sales and getting second
liens wiped out — something they were going to have to do anyway,” complained Bruce
Marks, founder of housing counseling group Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of
America.
More importantly, ordinary
homeowners who had been shafted by the banks remained angry. During Harris’s
Senate campaign, her opponent was flanked by members of Occupy Fights
Foreclosures, an outgrowth of Occupy LA, as she criticized Harris
(however disingenuously)
for not prosecuting a single top bank executive. The group had earlier written
Harris a letter calling for her to implement a moratorium on
foreclosures until she finished investigating fraud. Frustrated homeowners
complained of being denied meetings with Harris over the span of years,
and protested
at the 2015 California Democrats State Convention.
There was no better symbol of
Harris’s inability to hold the people behind the foreclosure fraud to account
than her Mortgage Fraud Strike Force. Opened to much fanfare in 2011 and
employing twenty-five Department of Justice lawyers and investigators with a
budget of more than $2 million to go after foreclosure fraud, the strike force
managed to prosecute just ten cases in three years, an East
Bay Express investigation in
2014 found.
The paper found that not only
had the strike force prosecuted less foreclosure fraud cases than many other
states, but it had filed fewer lawsuits than attorneys general in smaller
states with fewer victims, and even fewer than some county district attorneys.
Yet California led the country in terms of such scam operations, with many
thousands of complaints since 2010. One housing rights activist who had lost
his home in a fraud called the strike force a “public relations effort.”
Harris has repeatedly said she
was limited in what she could do. When a man at the 2016 California Democratic
Party convention asked
her, “How many bankers went to jail?” she said they did the best
with what evidence there was. “I too, like most Americans, am frustrated.
Clearly crimes occurred and people should go to jail,” she told
the LA
Times last year. “But we went where the evidence took us.”
This demonstrably wasn’t
always the case, however. Earlier this year, the Intercept obtained
a 2013
memo to Harris from prosecutors in the attorney general’s
office saying they had “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct”
at OneWest Best, and urging Harris to “conduct a full investigation of a
national bank’s misconduct and provide a public accounting of what happened.”
Yet Harris never did. (Coincidentally, Harris was the
only Democratic Senate candidate in 2016 to get a donation from
Steven Mnuchin, OneWest’s former CEO).
One has to wonder whether
there are other, similar memos out there, and how many.
“An Opportunity to Shine”
Harris’s many boosters in the
media will tell you that none of this matters. Rather than doing their job of
scrutinizing the record of a prospective presidential candidate, they
argue, they and other journalists should simply keep quiet and “give
her an opportunity to shine or not shine,” rather than “undercut her before she
even begins.”
This is an obviously ludicrous
idea, particularly coming from anyone who considers themselves a journalist.
But beyond that, if Harris plans on making a run for president, which she has
shown every intention of doing, anyone intending to play a role in selecting
the Democratic candidate come 2020 — from middle-of-the-road liberals to
leftists — should have a clear-eyed understanding of her record.
It’s undoubtable that there
are many things in Harris’ history to be encouraged by, from her pursuit of
corporate polluters and her implementation of policies to prevent recidivism in
the past, to her more recent steadfast opposition to the Trump administration
and her support of progressive legislation in the Senate.
But it helps no one to turn
acknowledgement of her positives into a starry-eyed distortion of her record.
Every politician — including Bernie
Sanders— has some bad to go with the good on their record. But in
Harris’ case, the bad has often directly undercut the good.
It should matter to us that
Harris, the ardent criminal justice reformer, not only did little to enact this
reform during her years as a prosecutor but backed harsh, punitive policies
that undermined her own progressive rhetoric on the issue. It should matter
that she at times did so needlessly, taking a harsher stance than her
right-wing opponents. It should matter that she repeatedly attempted to keep an
innocent man locked up in prison and attempted to defend a falsified
confession.
And if she continues to sell
herself to the public as a take-no-prisoners prosecutor who went after
financial misdeeds in defense of the ordinary homeowner, then it should matter
that her record on this was more underwhelming than even some county district
attorneys.
These are not narrow, niche
issues. In fact, many of them — criminal justice reform, drug legalization,
foreclosure fraud — are ones that particularly affect communities of color. And
despite her rhetoric now, Harris has often been either inactive or on the wrong
side of them.
Harris has shown the capacity
to be moved leftwards when pressured by activism. This is no small thing. But
you can’t pressure Harris — or any other politician, for that matter — without
having an understanding of her record beyond the fuzzy PR that Democratic
loyalists are currently trying to substitute for actual political discussion.
Perhaps Harris will end up the 2020 nominee. Then it’s all the more important
we understand her inadequacies.
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