Vice President Kamala Harris claimed the mantle of a civil rights champion as part of her presidential campaign origin fable. But her record tells a darker tale. At every step of her career, Harris has proven that the most dangerous place for a constitutional norm to be is standing between Harris and her political ambitions.
Let’s start with her time as San Francisco district attorney, a position she won by running against her boss, a progressive D.A., by claiming to be a tough-on-crime prosecutor. Having fooled the voting public and secured the position, she immediately began to tack left, declaring four months into the job that she would refuse to seek the death penalty against the murderer of policeman Isaac Espinoza, who was 29, with a young family when he was gunned down in cold blood.
Although she likes to portray herself as the “top cop” of California, cops despised her from that moment on. Harris received the dishonor of being named the “most progressive DA” in California – in other words, Kamala Harris was the most far-left prosecutor in the most liberal state. Harris’ sanctuary city policies enabled Edwin Ramos, for example, to murder a father and his two sons.
As D.A., Harris was the worst of both worlds: A soft-on-crime progressive prosecutor who failed to keep her city safe, and who looked the other way when it came to ethics and public integrity. In 2010, Harris’s lead drug prosecutor alerted supervisors of evidence that one of their top technicians was an unreliable witness, including a prior criminal conviction.
Despite a binding Supreme Court case, Brady v. Maryland, mandating prosecutors turn over such information to the defense, Harris’s office concealed it. Once discovered, this flagrant constitutional violation led to the dismissal of over 600 drug cases.
Narrowly elected to attorney general in 2010, Harris proceeded to double down on ignoring constitutional rights when expedient.
In 2011, the Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its inmate population because of prison overcrowding. In 2015, after four years and two separate court orders mandating action, California was still non-compliant. During litigation leading to the second order, Harris’s deputies argued that if the state was forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose a crucial part of its captive labor force because the prisoners earned wages between 8 and 37 cents per hour.
They reasoned that implementing the federal court’s proposed order would “severely impact fire camp participation—a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.”
Legal scholars and commentators were astounded. Erwin Chemerinsky, now dean of UC Berkeley Law School, compared Harris’ defiance of federal court mandates to 1950s southern governors ignoring desegregation orders. The Atlantic wrote that Harris’ filings were “unworthy of a first-year associate, much less the chief lawyer of our nation’s most populous state.”
When confronted with these critiques, Harris claimed she was shocked by her office’s arguments. She either had no clue what was happening in the biggest civil rights case her office was handling, or she simply lied and threw her deputies under the bus to distance herself from a backlash. Incompetent, or mendacious?
In the case of my client, Trilochan Singh Oberoi, an observant Sikh with a military background who sought a job as a prison guard but was denied on religious grounds, Harris caused her office to filibuster for four years. She argued against the applicability of well-settled religious liberty norms, before finally caving in and settling the case for attorney fees, back pay and a job after a national coalition of civil rights groups across the political spectrum joined hands to demand justice.
Harris went on to distort California charity regulations by stretching non-profit donor reporting laws to force charities to out their donors. This policy chilled nonprofit donations as proponents of cancel culture used public disclosures to blacklist, boycott and pressure donors. The Supreme Court struck down Harris’s policy as an unconstitutional First Amendment violation in Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta.
In doing so, the court reaffirmed its landmark decision in NAACP v. Alabama that the First Amendment protects the civil right of private association. Harris was unfazed, having already moved on.
During her ill-fated 2019 presidential campaign, Harris continued to demonstrate flippant disregard for the Constitution. At a townhall, she stated that if elected, she would “give the United States Congress 100 days to get their act together and” pass gun control legislation. “And if they fail to do it, then” she would “take executive action.” That is, if the legislative branch failed to enact policies she wanted, she would usurp its Constitutional authority and enact such policies by fiat, Constitution be damned.
Kamala Harris was no defender of civil rights when she exercised executive power as a district attorney and state attorney general. As president, Harris has already promised to ignore the Constitutional separation of powers and enact whatever policies she damn well pleases, just as she ignored Brady, Title VII, prisoner’s rights and due process. She’s shown us who she is all along, and voters should pay heed.
Harmeet K. Dhillon is founder and CEO of the Center for American Liberty.
