Kamela Harris Is Destructive and Appalling

Sen. Kamela Harris' laughing at prosecuting California
parents for kids' tardiness or truancy has not been addressed
yet on the campaign trail. See The Young Turks.

Since declaring her campaign for president, Sen. Kamela Harris (D-CA) has emitted policy stands with the authenticity of most other packaged liberal pols like Clinton, Biden or Kerry.

But in Harris' case, there is a vainglorious quality to this apparently deluded woman caught on video laughing about how funny it is to send black and brown parents to jail when their children miss school.

Politicians are egotists, but Harris has convinced herself that using the state as a "stick" on parents of color makes her the right Democratic candidate for president.

Days before declaring her run for the presidency, Harris reflected on Jan. 21, 2019, "This is where it all began" at Howard University, the venerable institution where Harris says she became enthralled with the idea of becoming a prosecutor.

Anybody who dreams of becoming a prosecutor as a student is either obtuse, malicious or pathological.

America is a police-prosecutor-prison state that destroys lives, a perverse pursuit aimed especially at black and brown folks.

So, how did it all turn out for Harris after her start at Howard?

She became a prosecutor and California attorney general where she defended wrongful convictions, became a drug warrior and infamously became giddy on the 2010 campaign trail in recounting to the Commonwealth Club how she jailed the parents of students who were late or absent from school.

Democratic Party primary voters should watch this video below on The Young Turks discussing the Commonwealth Club appearance because, honestly, there is something wrong with a strutting candidate cackling about inflicting stress and prison onto low-income parents.

Harris' recounting of imprisoning parents is almost as disheartening as Trump throwing children into cages. Someone so out-of-touch with the struggles of low-income children, and so happy to use the state as a punitive stick against parents is someone for whom I'll never vote.

Video of Harris' laughter and narrative went viral last January; and Harris' broader record as a prosecutor is the subject of analyses by Briahna Gray in The Intercept, Lara Bazelon in the New York Times, Marie Gottschalk in In These Times and others.

Writes Gray in The Intercept:

[Harris is] running for president as a progressive, but as attorney general of California, she criminalized truancy — making it a crime for kids to be late for school and dragging into the criminal justice system even more disproportionately low-income, predominantly black and Latino families. She’s overlooked the misconduct of her prosecutors and fought to uphold their wrongfully secured convictions. She defended California’s choice to deny gender reassignment surgery to a transgender inmate, and in 2014, she appealed a federal judge’s holding that the death penalty was unconstitutional.

The list goes on and on. But in some ways, the details don’t matter. The problem isn’t that Harris was an especially bad prosecutor. She made positive contributions as well, encouraging education and re-entry programs for ex-offenders, for instance. The problem, more precisely, is that she was ever a prosecutor at all.

To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system.

That's right.

One hopes someone poses the following question to Harris at the CNN Democratic Presidential debate next week:

What the hell is so funny about sending parents with struggling children to jail? Why were you laughing at the Commonwealth Club?