Thursday, December 27, 2018

Kamala Harris Would Make a Hell of a Chief Executive


I've been impressed by Sen. Kamala Harris since I watched her dismantle Attorney General Jeff Sessions -- "You're making me nervous," he whined at her on June 13, 2017. Mr. Chicken who couldn't remember scratch is gone, but Senator Harris has risen as a possible presidential contender.





She's obviously a skilled prosecutor and has the history of study and public office to prove it. She got her law degree from the University of California's Hastings College of Law and got her feet wet as an attorney for the City of San Francisco, then ran successfully for district attorney of the city and county of San Francisco in 2003. In 2009, Harris wrote Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer in which (according to Wikipedia) "she looked at criminal justice from an economic perspective and attempted to reduce temptation and access for criminals" (the love of filthy lucre being the root of all evil, yes and amen!).

She ain't no bleeding heart: "While Harris was the San Francisco District Attorney, the overall felony conviction rate rose from 52% in 2003 to 67% in 2006, the highest in a decade .... convictions of drug dealers increased from 56% in 2003 to 74% in 2006." Conviction rate for homicides went up too, though Harris is strong against the death penalty. Life in prison for cold-blooded murderers is adequate for her.

In 2010, Harris ran for and was elected Attorney General of California, winning the Democratic primary in a crowded field. She got more than twice the votes as her nearest competitor. She was reelected attorney general in 2014. After Senator Barbara Boxer announced her retirement, Harris ran for her Senate seat and won in 2016. She's in her first term.

She is in every way imaginable the very image of the new America. Child of immigrants from Jamaica and India, well educated and instinctually smart, she's a crusader. She participated in a suit against five big California banks over the sub-prime mortgage crisis and secured over $12 billion in debt reduction for bamboozled homeowners.

She has an interesting history with DJT's Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin: In 2013, she did not prosecute his bank OneWest despite evidence "suggestive of widespread misconduct," according to a leaked memo from the Department of Justice. In 2017, Harris said that her office's decision to not prosecute Mnuchin was based on "following the facts and the evidence ... like any other case." Here's where eyebrows really started going north: In 2016, Mnuchin donated $2,000 to Harris's senate campaign. Then this inexplicably happened: as senator, Harris voted against the confirmation of Mnuchin to become Twitterman's Secretary of the Treasury.

If she runs for president, that curious history will be mined. Anyone as involved in public policy implementation as Kamala Harris will have loads of decisions subject to investigation and opposition research ... if she runs for president. (She's supposed to announce her decision early in 2019.)

Here's more of Harris as a senator on the Judiciary Committee, questioning Rod Rosenstein about protecting the independence of special prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigation -- all more than relevant now in light of the temporary head of the Department of Justice that Twitterman put in Sessions' place and in light of the dude Twitterman has nominated as his permanent replacement for Attorney General of the United States.





I'd pay money to see her in a debate with the biggest damned ignorant fool on the planet (and you know who I'm talking about!).

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