[D66] Who is Kamala Harris?

[R.O.]

Who is Democratic Senator Kamala Harris?
By Dan Conway
12 August 2020

Joseph Biden’s selection of the first-term Senator and former state 
Attorney General from California Kamala Harris as his running mate comes 
as no surprise and solidifies the Democratic Party establishment’s 
right-wing ticket for the 2020 presidential elections.

As was the case in her bid for the Democratic Party nomination earlier 
this year, Harris’s mixed ethnicity—her father is Jamaican and her 
mother is Tamil—was a significant factor in the calculations behind her 
selection by Biden. In the remaining three months before election day on 
November 3, the Democrats are clearly doubling down on race and gender 
identity politics.

Indicating the consensus behind the Biden-Harris ticket, both Hillary 
Clinton and Bernie Sanders quickly endorsed her selection.

In the political profile of Harris below, published in July 2019 when 
she was one of the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential 
nomination, the World Socialist Web Site summed up her career as a 
representative of the US criminal justice system and a reliable defender 
of corporate and intelligence state interests.

***

Among the two dozen candidates now running for the 2020 Democratic 
presidential nomination, California senator Kamala Harris has regularly 
polled among the top five contenders for the party’s nomination since 
announcing her candidacy last January.

Both the corporate media and the Democratic Party establishment hailed 
her performance in the June 26-27 debate in Miami, when she attacked 
former Vice President Joe Biden over his comments about busing and 
working with segregationist Democrats in the Senate. She has moved up in 
both the polls and fundraising since then, hitting first place in a poll 
of California voters this week for the first time.

With two of her four main rivals being white men in their mid-70s, the 
54-year-old Harris, given her gender and mixed Jamaican and south Indian 
ancestry, is a likely selection for vice president even if she fails to 
win the nomination, considering the Democratic Party’s embrace of the 
politics of gender and racial identity.

Harris, like the rest of the Democratic field, is trying to posture as a 
progressive alternative to Trump, while, in her case, seeking to split 
the difference between Biden, the “moderate” frontrunner, and his two 
main challengers from the “left” wing of the party, Bernie Sanders and 
Elizabeth Warren. Harris has tried to have it both ways, combining the 
“electability” argument of Biden with the suggestion that, as a former 
prosecutor, she would aggressively challenge Trump.

At the heart of Harris’s candidacy—as far as her credentials with the 
ruling class are concerned—is her record as a ruthless operative in the 
fields of criminal justice and national security. She was district 
attorney in San Francisco for six years, then California state 
attorney-general for the same length of time, before winning a Senate 
seat in 2016.

Senate Democratic leaders promoted Harris from the start, giving her 
plum committee assignments, including Budget, Homeland Security and 
Judiciary, where she was heavily publicized for her role in the 
questioning of Supreme Court nominee, now justice, Brett Kavanaugh.

Most revealing was her appointment to the Intelligence Committee in 
2017—the only newly elected Democrat to be given such a critical 
position, and an indication that, as far as the Democratic Party 
establishment and the military-intelligence apparatus were concerned, 
Harris is a “safe pair of hands.”

Harris has repaid this confidence by acting as the point woman, among 
the Democratic presidential candidates, for the bogus anti-Russian 
campaign, demanding Trump’s impeachment, not for his flagrant violations 
of the US Constitution or his persecution of immigrants, but based on 
the McCarthyite smear that he is a stooge of Moscow.

Speaking at the California Democratic Party’s convention in early June, 
Harris said, “Let’s talk about this so-called commander in chief. He 
parrots Russia’s lies over the word of American intelligence and law 
enforcement leaders. He denies that Russia interfered in the election of 
the president of the United States. We need to begin impeachment 
proceedings and we need a new commander in chief.”

She continued along these lines in the June 27 Democratic debate, when 
she repeatedly attacked Trump on foreign policy, declaring, on North 
Korea, that Trump “embraces Kim Jong-un, a dictator, for the sake of a 
photo op,” adding that “he takes the word of the Russian president over 
the word of the American intelligence community when it comes to a 
threat to our democracy and our elections.” In a post-debate interview 
on MSNBC, Harris attacked Trump for taking “the word of a Saudi prince 
over the word of the American intelligence community” on the murder of 
Jamal Khashoggi.

For Harris, as for the Democratic Party as a whole, there is no greater 
breach of political norms than failing to take “the word of the American 
intelligence community.”
A career prosecutor

Harris began her political career in 1990 as a deputy district attorney 
for Alameda County, which includes the city of Oakland, before crossing 
the bay to a similar position in San Francisco in 1998. She quickly made 
high-level connections, moving in elite social circles, where she 
cultivated patrons like oil heiress Vanessa Getty. She briefly dated 
then California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who became mayor of San 
Francisco and promoted her political career and financial interests.

By the time Harris decided to challenge incumbent San Francisco District 
Attorney Terence Hallinan in 2004, she was able to outraise him by 
two-to-one and spent so much money on the campaign that the San 
Francisco Ethics Commission imposed a record fine for violating the 
city’s campaign finance law. Hallinan, a former defense lawyer with 
close ties to Bay Area radical circles—his father had been the 1952 
presidential candidate of the Progressive Party—was opposed by the 
business establishment, the police unions, and the San Francisco 
Chronicle, whose editorial on the contest was headlined: “Harris, for 
law and order.”

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Six years later, Harris was the consensus Democratic Party choice for 
the position of state attorney general being vacated by Jerry Brown, who 
was the Democratic candidate for governor. She ran with backing of her 
local congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, and both Democratic senators, Dianne 
Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.

As both a city prosecutor and as the top law enforcement official in the 
largest US state, Harris made a name for herself as a strict “law and 
order” advocate. As San Francisco District Attorney, she prided herself 
on the high conviction rates obtained oftentimes heedless of ethical 
legal practice. Felony conviction rates rose from 52 percent in 2003 to 
67 percent in 2006 under her leadership.

This increase in convictions, however, was often due to clear misconduct 
on the part of Harris and her office. In 2012, Superior Court Judge 
Ann-Christine Massulo ruled that Harris’s office violated defendants’ 
rights by withholding damaging information about a corrupt police crime 
lab technician who had stolen drugs and falsified reports.

As state attorney-general, Harris took on the high-profile defense of 
the state prison system against court rulings condemning overcrowding 
and mistreatment of prisoners as unconstitutional “cruel and unusual 
punishment.” She sought to end federal court supervision of the prisons, 
later defending her aggressive advocacy with the cynical statement that 
as the principal legal representative of the state government, “I have a 
client, and I don’t get to choose my client.”

In 2015, Harris attempted to overturn a lower court ruling declaring the 
state’s death penalty laws cruel and inhumane. Once again Harris claimed 
that she was simply defending her client, the state of California which 
didn’t necessarily reflect her own views on the subject.

When the US Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata in 2014 declared the state’s 
prisons so overcrowded that they constituted cruel and unusual 
punishment, Harris fought the ruling. Prisoners were stacked in 
three-person bunkbeds and were falling ill and dying for lack of medical 
care. The state of California was subsequently ordered to reduce its 
prison population by 40,000 inmates. Harris actually argued that if 
California released inmates too soon, the state would lose an important 
source of labor, citing its reliance on untrained prison inmates risking 
their lives fighting wildfires for $2 a day.

In 2015, Harris defended convictions obtained by county prosecutors 
after the latter had inserted false confessions into interrogation 
transcripts. Harris asserted at the time that perjury was not sufficient 
to demonstrate prosecutorial misconduct.

The vindictive, anti-democratic character of Harris’s tenure as attorney 
general was not limited to the courtroom either. In 2010, Harris 
sponsored a law, later signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, which 
sought to improve schools by jailing parents of truant children and 
subjecting them to fines of up to $2,000. Even though the law explicitly 
made jail time a probable outcome for parents of truant children, Harris 
claimed in a CNN interview last May that sending parents to jail was an 
“unintended consequence” of the law.

Harris used her powers as a prosecutor to conduct vicious attacks on the 
poor and working class while doing her utmost to shield police and 
politicians from punishment. This stands in marked contrast to what her 
campaign claims was her record of virtually untarnished progressivism 
while in office. In her book, The Truths We Hold, issued to help launch 
her campaign, Harris mixes typical sentimental boilerplate with overt 
falsifications of her political record. She describes herself as a 
“progressive prosecutor.” Moreover, she claims she “used the powers of 
the office with a sense of fairness, perspective and experience.”

Many who’ve followed her career as prosecutor have had a different 
perspective, however. Lara Bazelon, former director of the Loyola Law 
School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles, wrote in a New York 
Times op-ed, “Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace 
criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s 
attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent.” Donald 
Specter, executive director of the Prison Law Office, stated in a Daily 
Beast interview, “As far as I know, she did very little if anything to 
improve the criminal justice system when she was attorney general.”
Adopting the persona of a “progressive”

Harris launched her presidential campaign with the slogan “Kamala Harris 
for the people,” a reference to the statement of identification made by 
district attorneys and other prosecutors when they appear in court. In 
fits and starts, she adopted positions on a variety of economic and 
social issues which can be portrayed as vaguely “progressive,” although 
on closer examination they usually amount to nothing. On the few 
occasions where she has, perhaps inadvertently, voiced a “left” 
sentiment, she invariably qualifies it or takes it back the next day.

Thus she embraced the call of Bernie Sanders for “Medicare for all,” but 
has twice reversed herself on the question of ending private health 
insurance in favor of a federally financed system, an indication that 
she really has no intention of implementing such a plan.

Harris also sponsored, along with fellow presidential candidate 
Elizabeth Warren, a Senate bill known as the Climate Risk Disclosure Act 
which would use “market forces to speed up the transition from fossil 
fuels to cleaner energy.” The bill was based on the claims of former 
Vice President Al Gore and other Democratic Party leaders that 
environmental clean-up and “green energy” can be promoted as 
profit-making enterprises.

This bankrupt proposal issues no penalties for polluting companies. It 
requires them to do nothing to curb pollution aside from listing the 
amount of greenhouse gases they emit, what fossil fuels they use and how 
their asset valuations will be affected if they were to reduce carbon 
emissions in line with the Paris climate accords.

On immigration, Harris has also promised to protect DACA recipients from 
deportation and publicly opposed Trump’s border wall with Mexico. She 
tacitly supported the recent Senate passage of $4.6 billion for Trump’s 
network of concentration camps for immigrants along the US-Mexico 
border. Like the other Senate Democrats running for president, she was 
absent for the vote. The bill was approved by a bipartisan 84-8 margin.

Other legislative proposals were crafted with an eye to their political 
popularity among Democratic primary voters, to give Harris a more 
liberal image than her actual record in California or Washington. She 
supported federal legalization of recreational marijuana and increases 
in public defender pay to the levels of their state prosecutor 
counterparts. After the wave of teacher strikes, Harris called for a 
$13,500-a-year pay increase for every schoolteacher in the US.

She has also called for increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per 
hour, which, in addition to leaving minimum wage workers still severely 
impoverished, would make many of these workers ineligible for public 
assistance programs such as food stamps, housing subsidies and Medicaid.

In part, Harris’s comparative lack of skill at populist posturing is 
rooted in her own life circumstances. She earned six-figure incomes for 
decades and is now a millionaire many times over. According to her tax 
returns, released in April, she and her husband, wealthy lawyer Douglas 
Emhoff, had an adjusted gross income of $1,884,319 in 2018, putting them 
comfortably in the top 0.1 percent. The bulk of this came from Emhoff’s 
entertainment law practice, while Harris made $157,352 in Senate salary 
and $320,125 in net profits from her campaign memoir.

While Harris has been half-hearted and inconsistent in her attempts at 
social demagogy—not the natural bent of someone who spent most of her 
career putting people in jail or defending police atrocities against the 
working class—she has shown somewhat more energy in embracing identity 
politics, which she has previously invoked as the “first black and 
female” DA of San Francisco, the “first black and female” attorney 
general of California, and currently as the only black and female US 
senator.

Harris jumped on the #MeToo bandwagon, being among the first to call for 
the resignation of Minnesota Senator Al Franken over accusations of 
sexual misconduct. These demands were made in spite of the fact that 
none of the allegations had been proven and even if they had, none would 
have risen even to the level of a misdemeanor criminal charge.

Harris introduced a bill known as the Maternal CARE ACT to address 
racial disparities in the care of expectant black mothers which have led 
to pregnancy-related deaths happening at a rate of 3.3 times more than 
white mothers. The bill was introduced after a May 10 report released by 
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The CDC report largely recommends a more scientific approach to the 
issue, including greater access to prenatal programs and other services 
for expectant mothers, temporary housing programs, better adoption of 
sepsis, hemorrhage, and transfusion protocols among medical personnel, 
etc. Harris’s Maternal CARE Act, on the other hand, roots the problem in 
race and particularly in what she alleges to be the conscious and 
widespread bias of health care practitioners. The bill would earmark 
$150 million to identify high risk pregnancies in order to “provide new 
mothers with the culturally competent care and resources they need.”

At this point in the campaign, it can be said that Harris, more so than 
any other candidate, has taken up the reactionary mantle of identity 
politics. In that sense, she has taken her cue from the 2016 campaign of 
Hillary Clinton. The senator’s younger sister, Maya Harris, was a senior 
policy adviser to Clinton’s 2016 campaign and currently works as 
chairwoman for the Harris 2020 campaign.

The younger Harris also works as a political analyst for MSNBC and is 
married to Tony West, general counsel for Uber and former United States 
Associate Attorney General in the Obama administration. Maya Harris also 
edited drafts of Stanford University law professor Michelle Alexander’s 
2010 book, The New Jim Crow. The work, which spent a significant amount 
of time on the New York Times bestseller list, argued that a new racial 
caste system existed in the United States, largely enforced by the 
actions of poor whites, which far outweighed any and all considerations 
of class as a significant social division.

There can be no doubt that if Harris were to succeed in her presidential 
run, the bourgeois media would subject the public to a constant 
propaganda barrage, celebrating the transformative character of the 
first female president and the first black female president at that. 
Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, is only the third woman 
of African descent to run for the office.

This would in no way change the fact that a Harris administration would 
be as reactionary as Trump and Obama before her.