Not So Fast! Kamala Harris’ Track Record Deserves Scrutiny

By Nikos Biggs-Chiropolos, The Kennedy Beacon

The Democratic Party’s leadership and elite donors are stacking the deck for Vice President Kamala Harris, now that President Joe Biden, following his late withdrawal from the race, has elevated her to the top of the heap. 

Once again, the Democrats have chosen to forgo anything resembling a fair selection process, this time to facilitate Harris’s ascension as a black woman and the first female president. 

Although she brands herself as a “progressive prosecutor,” Harris’s prosecutorial record was actually tough on petty crimes and left a disproportionate number of black men incarcerated, as shown by an LA Times investigation.

Democrats appear to have learned nothing from the scandal that took place in 2016, when Hillary Clinton used control over superdelegates to secure her party’s nomination. This time, Democratic Party delegates have gone even further by racing to endorse Kamala Harris, despite the fact that she received no votes in the party’s sham 2024 primary. However, unlike with Clinton, there has been surprisingly little scrutiny of Harris’s political record. 

Previously an unknown California political insider, Harris is now standing for the highest political office. But what does she actually stand for? The answer seems to be not much, except her own political gain.

Initially touted as one of the Democratic Party’s frontrunners, Harris drew 20,000 people to her 2020 campaign launch. In early August 2019, she called herself a “top-tier” candidate in response to tough debate scrutiny from her Democratic opponent Tulsi Gabbard. But Gabbard’s comments painted a bleak picture of Harris’s accomplishments that stuck:

Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president, but I’m deeply concerned about this record.… [S]he put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man [Jamal Trulove] from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the State of California.

The Harris campaign never recovered from that moment, and by early December 2019 – while polling in the low single digits, and more than a month before any primary votes were cast – her presidential bid fizzled and ran out of money. 

Early Prosecutorial Career

Long before her foray as a presidential candidate, there were questions about her record.

In her successful campaign to become San Francisco’s district attorney, SFGate reported that Harris campaigned by slamming the incumbent DA, Terence Hallinan, as being soft on gun violence. Harris calls herself a “progressive prosecutor,” but Hallinan observed at the time, “She says anything that’s convenient to her at the moment.”

After taking office, Harris cracked down hard on petty crimes like marijuana violations, as reported in The Mercury News, and took an oppressive approach to school truancy, which led to the jailing of parents whose children missed school, most of whom were non-white and working class. The LA Times reports that Harris now claims this was an “unintended consequence” of her policy. Yet SFGate wrote in 2006, when Harris announced the policy, that parental jail time was a possible outcome, and she spoke about it herself in a talk to the Commonwealth Club. 

As Newsweek reports, Harris has further been criticized for the quadruple murder conviction of Kevin Cooper, who has been on death row since 1983. During Harris’s term as California’s attorney general, her office argued against the use of DNA evidence in an appeal that could have exonerated Cooper.

As noted by Gabbard, after the 2011 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata found California’s prisons to be so overcrowded that they constituted cruel and unusual punishment, AG Harris fought against the release of prisoners, in an effort to retain the unpaid labor of inmate firefighters. In a press conference following Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said of Harris, “She kept [the prisoners] in there saying that we needed them for firefighting and for other public works services. And that’s just a modern version of indentured servitude, a modern version of slavery.”

National Record and Vice Presidency

Harris, whose father was Jamaican and whose mother was Indian, is now being marketed as a breaker of racial barriers. However, as Politico reported during the 2020 election cycle, “Harris placed no higher than third among black voters in POLITICO/Morning Consult polls since August, behind Biden and Bernie Sanders, and she trailed Elizabeth Warren in fourth.”

Harris’s failed primary campaign is most remembered for a viral debate moment in June 2020, when she hammered Biden for refusing to support busing as a method of school desegregation – claiming that she had been a beneficiary of such programs as a girl and implying that his position was racist. Later clarifications revealed that Harris actually held the same position as Biden on the issue. And, despite her scathing criticism of him, Harris flipped her position toward Biden shockingly fast and jumped in to endorse him, before giddily accepting the opportunity to serve as his running mate and eventual vice president.

A recent investigation by The American Prospect finds that “throughout her political career, Harris has surrounded herself with staffers and close advisors who have gone on to actively fight against the core pillars of her own administration’s agenda to regulate corporations.” Numerous former Harris staffers have “used their connections to secure high-powered positions at companies and lobbying shops on K Street,” such as Starbucks and Airbnb. 

Harris was the only 2016 Democratic candidate for Senate who received donations from investment banker Steven Mnuchin – who became treasury secretary in 2017. As a senator, she served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees antitrust issues, and yet her legislative record is sparse, despite all the attention she receives. Currently, firms representing Google and Amazon in lawsuits brought by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, respectively, are also serving as Harris’s personal counsel and helping her screen potential running mates. 

Jamie Court, president of the California-based group Consumer Watchdog, told The New York Times that Harris “presided over this era of great consolidation and power in the hands of these tech giants and she didn’t do a thing.” The Times article in which that quote appears is titled “How Kamala Harris Forged Close Ties with Big Tech,” which again shows the depth of her ties to these corporate giants – offering clues to why she is so popular with the party establishment.

It all begs the question: Is Harris’ core mission to stand up “for the people” (her presidential campaign slogan) as a “progressive prosecutor,” or rather to defend rich people, companies, and Democratic Party elites, as evidenced by her record?

As vice president, Harris has received extraordinarily low approval ratings, according to the ABC News FiveThirtyEight polling average – even worse than President Biden’s numbers through most of their term in office, until the president’s recent decline. She was tasked with overseeing the US southern border, which has become a humanitarian crisis.

In sharp contrast to Harris, who laughed when asked on CNN if she had been to the border, Kennedy has spent time there. He has highlighted the situation during several visits and elaborated the most viable plans of any candidate for fixing the problem. Meanwhile, what has Harris been doing?

A comparison of her work as a lawyer and Kennedy’s history of suing the most powerful corporations in the world and winning – as well as holding the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and other federal agencies to account – puts Harris’s professional record to shame.

Environmental Record

Harris presents herself as a champion for the environment and claimed last year that she started the first environmental justice unit of any DA’s office in the country. Yet an investigation by Lee Fang finds that her record is largely exaggerated and that she has focused mostly on punishing individuals and small offenders, rather than the big corporations that cause widespread harm.

Examples include her prosecutions of a man who conducted illegal smog checks and of a left-leaning newspaper that illegally left old ink containers in an abandoned parking lot. Meanwhile, she declined to charge the Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) after it was accused of being responsible for a pipeline explosion that killed eight people and injured 58. Fang  writes that PG&E “employed many of her campaign aides as paid advisers to the company.”

Kennedy, by contrast, has lived a life of genuine commitment to environmental justice. For example, he founded the Waterkeeper Alliance, an organization that now has over 350 members in 46 countries around the world working to keep rivers and other water sources free of pollution. Kennedy has fought corporate polluters by challenging regulatory authorities to properly enforce neglected contamination laws and standards. In other words, he has taken on both corporate and government abuses to better serve the public, not special interests.

As the DNC foists Harris onto the public, oters who seek to reform the political stagnation afflicting the United States, and potentially stop Donald Trump, must ask themselves: Who – Harris or Kennedy – is more likely to challenge the ingrained paralysis of the system, enact viable plans, and win?