Harris has characterized herself as a reformer. But some critics disagree.
Whatever Harris did as a prosecutor seems reasonable given both the context of the time she during which was a prosecutor, and her overall political alignment. I would rather have a progressive presidential candidate like Bernie (too late), or AOC (maybe 2028 or later). But choosing Harris means that the overall “liberal” agenda stays on the table
Some highlights from the article
Harris, as part of her previous presidential campaign, also released a criminal justice reform plan that seeks to scale back incarceration, end the death penalty and solitary confinement, ban private prisons, and get rid of cash bail. Biden also backs a fairly aggressive criminal justice reform plan, despite his own mixed record on criminal justice issues.
A close examination of Harris’s record shows it’s filled with contradictions. She pushed for programs that helped people find jobs instead of putting them in prison, but also fought to keep people in prison even after they were proved innocent. She refused to pursue the death penalty against a man who killed a police officer, but also defended California’s death penalty system in court. She implemented training programs to address police officers’ racial biases, but also resisted calls to get her office to investigate certain police shootings.
But what seem like contradictions may reflect a balancing act. Harris’s parents worked on civil rights causes, and she came from a background well aware of the excesses of the criminal justice system — but in office, she played the role of a prosecutor and California’s lawyer. She started in an era when “tough on crime” politics were popular across party lines — but she rose to national prominence as criminal justice reform started to take off nationally. She had an eye on higher political office as support for criminal justice reform became de rigueur for Democrats — but she still had to work as California’s top law enforcement official.
Harris also pushed for more systemic reforms. Her most successful program as district attorney, “Back on Track,” allowed first-time drug offenders, including drug dealers, to get a high school diploma and a job instead of prison time. Adams, Harris’s previous spokesperson, noted that the program started in 2005, “when most prosecutors were using a ‘tough on crime’ approach.”
Wait, what’s the complaint? I read a lot of comments complaining about her prosecutorial record, so I was like what’s her record exactly? Then I shared the article. Are…are you complaining about how the internet works?
Edit: I also think she’s a reasonable prosecutor given she had to work during the “tough on crime” era. I can’t judge for what she did when everyone was doing the same wrong thing. In fact, I think she tried to be better? The question is what would she do differently now.
Ha. It’s not you, it’s just the instant spin-up of the “why not to vote for the Democrat” machine is gonna make people touchy about even a perfectly reasonable article that starts to cast about through the years for reasons to evaluate Harris poorly, with its implied pretense that we need to evaluate her for any length of time before deciding that voting for her is better than the alternative who is very literally worse than letting rabid dogs loose in a children’s hospital.
The complaint is that there is no time to do anything different. She's not a bad candidate just because she's not checking all your boxes. She's a great candidate for this situation.
If you want to complain about your lack of options, time travel back about 60 years. Ther rest of us are living here right now.
Complaining how the campaign media works yes. Biden literally just announced he was withdrawing hours ago.
We’re going to get into the nasty ugly shit and contention about Harris and whoever gets the VP nod shortly. Can we wait JUST A LITTLE WHILE PLEASE. Is that too much to ask?
Is a reluctance to go from a handful of months-long scraps about Biden immediately to articles about Harris-as-prosecutor some kind of outlier? These articles are going to flood in, the corporate news just did two huge rails of coke and will be up all night cranking out all the innuendo, inference, and suppositions anyone has any right to expect and it isn’t going to stop for months.
What the fuck, that’s outrageous. She should have been legislating for better laws and refusing to enforce the ones that I personally don’t agree with, now, in the modern day. Well. Anyway. What was the other guy doing during this time?
“Raping children”
Well I can’t see how putting him in charge of the most powerful country in the world, with an army of followers already organized to disable its democratic safeguards, could go wrong. Did anything go wrong with it last time? The more I think about it the more I feel like this election might be the perfect time to do some pointless grandstanding.
From what I can make out, she's got some hits and some misses in her history, but overall a pretty progressive record.
Edit: By "pretty progressive", I mean relative to the arternatives and what's to be expected from any Democrat. Which is to say of course not nearly progressive enough and tainted with bad choices. But certainly good enough to vote for instead of Trump.
She covered up that a state crime lab employee was falsifying evidence leading to hundreds of false convictions. She opposed police reform including opposing body cameras. Her office, she claims without her knowledge, argued that prisoners eligible for parole shouldn't be released from prisons so overcrowded that a judge ruled them cruel and unusual because it would reduce the availability of prison labor. She argued on two separate occasions that prisoners who had had their convictions overturned on the basis of actual innocence shouldn't be released from prison because they hadn't filed the motion for release quickly enough.
Her record is staunchly pro establishment and she has participated in acts of overt corruption to maintain the status quo.
She isn’t remotely progressive. There’s a long list of very problematic stuff she did while AG which the other commentator covered in part but there’s also:
The other guys wants to “deport” every single illegal immigrant.
Apparatus like that, once set up, usually finds applications which weren’t in the planning documents when they were presented for public consumption.
Honestly? Harris is not my favorite pick. But pretending that voting against Trump needs some kind of evaluation against the other alternative is pure poppycock.
counterpunch has extreme left bias according to media bias fact check site
Though professing to support a two-state solution, Harris has repeatedly refused to make any distinction between criticisms of the Israeli occupation and colonization in the West Bank and attacks on Israel itself.
That doesn't prove in ANY WAY that she is a blatant supporter of genocide, jesus fucking christ.
Harris has repeatedly refused to make any distinction between criticisms of the Israeli occupation
an easily proven lie
that article even quotes the intercept
Unlike some of her counterparts in the Senate, she has not publicly made any demands of Israel or Netanyahu regarding the human rights of Palestinians.
** U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris bluntly called out Israel on Sunday for not doing enough to ease a "humanitarian catastrophe" in Gaza as the Biden administration faces increasing pressure to rein in its close ally while it wages war with Hamas militants.**
Harris, speaking in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where state troopers beat U.S. civil rights marchers nearly six decades ago, called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and urged Hamas to accept a deal to release hostages in return for a 6-week cessation of hostilities.
But she directed the bulk of her comments at Israel in what appeared to be the sharpest rebuke yet by a senior leader in the U.S. government over the conditions in the coastal enclave.
"People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane and our common humanity compels us to act," Harris said at an event to commemorate the 59th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday" in Alabama. "The Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid. No excuses," Harris said.
Her comments reflected intense frustration, if not desperation, within the U.S. government about the war, which has hurt President Joe Biden with left-leaning voters as he seeks re-election this year.
oh but she totally is blatantly supporting the genocide!!!!
edit: yes, downvote me for bringing you inconvenient truths that don't fall within your little narrative.
I've already seen people try to attack her for putting pot smokers in jail, you know, like how the law requires??
Then, when they are shown the fact that she was part of the effort to reschedule marijuana and they call her a hypocrite... Why didn't she then go and reverse all those cases... THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS.
Biden pardoned every prisoner in federal prison for possession (which wasn’t many; most are in prison at the state level, but if you’re one of them, it’s significant.) And, the Democrats introduced multiple bills to legalize marijuana.
Because voting’s not important and the Democrats aren’t good enough, though, there were enough Republicans in place that a couple of tepidly oppositional Democrats were enough to defeat the legalization bills.
So, she was literally reflecting the will of the voters with some of her decisions. Given that, I think her choices make sense.
In one instance — her handling of California’s “three strikes” law — Harris was arguably ahead of the time. Under the law, someone who committed a third felony could go to prison for 25 years to life, even if the third felony was a nonviolent crime. But Harris required that the San Francisco district attorney’s office only charge for a third strike if the felony was a serious or violent crime.
California voters in 2004, the year that Harris took office, rejected a ballot initiative to implement a similar reform statewide — though the ballot proposal had some pushback on the details, leading to Harris’s own opposition. It wasn’t until 2012 that voters approved the change.
“There’s been incredibly rapid change in public opinion, in attention to criminal justice,” Silard said, citing his decades-long experience in the criminal justice system and current experience as president of the reform-minded Rosenberg Foundation. “Bringing a reverse lens to that is not fair, and also doesn’t recognize folks who were courageous at that time.”
Admittedly this is from her time as an Attorney General, not a prosecutor, but that was more recent and therefore more worrying to me:
”Harris’s office launched into a campaign of all-out obstruction, refusing to answer why they could not simply release low-risk, nonviolent inmates to conform to the Supreme Court’s request."
All that to say, I want her as my president. This is just a pretty big stain on her record, and I hope she has continued to grow and change so that the Harris we see today isn't the Harris that would fight to keep people in prison at any cost.