Kamala Harris: A ruthless authoritarian, one heartbeat away from the presidency

This prospect is, frankly, terrifying.

Ruthless pursuit of power, no matter the cost, defines Harris’s political career to date. Time and time again, the California senator’s record shows she views peoples’ rights and legal constraints on her power as mere obstacles on her climb up the political ladder.

It’s impossible to draw any other conclusion from even a cursory glance at Harris’s tenure as California attorney general, the office she held from 2011 to 2017, as well as her time as San Francisco district attorney before that. Harris, who now claims the mantle of progressivism and social justice, repeatedly used the power as a prosecutor to crush the innocent for political gain.

Harris’s office imprisoned thousands of nonviolent marijuana offenders. Yet she feels zero regret for this injustice, and in 2014 laughed in the face of a reporter who asked if she supported legalizing marijuana. (Harris has now flip-flopped and embraced legalization.)

Of course, in typically hypocritical fashion, the vice presidential candidate has herself admitted to using marijuana in the past. Now, she regularly cites “racial justice” in her efforts to lobby for more political power — even though her prosecutorial efforts directly contributed to the fallout of the war on drugs that disproportionately locks up African Americans.

Even worse, Harris fought to keep individuals in prison even in the face of exonerating evidence. That’s right: Her conviction rate and prosecutorial record were more important to her than freeing people wrongly imprisoned.

The depths of Harris’s apathy for the welfare of her constituents caught up in the criminal justice system truly knows no bounds. As the Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe noted, “Harris also kept Californians locked up in overcrowded prisons, used them for cheap labor to fight wildfires, and paid them $1 a day in defiance of a federal order demanding increased early parole programs. On the issue of civil asset forfeiture, she’s one of the only people in America more extreme than Jeff Sessions.”

As district attorney, Harris’s agenda resulted in the locking up of impoverished mothers over their children’s truancy. She undoubtedly knew this would only make these families’ situation worse, but evidently thought it was politically expedient and didn’t care. Even the New York Times has admitted that Harris “championed state legislation under which parents whose children were found to be habitually truant in elementary school could be prosecuted, despite concerns that it would disproportionately affect low-income people of color.”

These are just a handful of examples. Harris’s career is littered with far too many abuses of power to list in one article.

But perhaps the most frightening thing about Harris’s candidacy is that no matter what she does, the liberal media covers her glowingly. Just look at how the New York Times and Associated Press put out reports on Harris’s selection that claim she is a “pragmatic moderate” and read more like campaign press releases than objective reporting. And as the Washington Examiner‘s Becket Adams pointed out, MSNBC just recently gave Harris such a soft interview that “It is tempting to call it a softball interview, but at least in softball, they still have to pitch the ball.”

The media is willing to cover for her at every turn, and no ethics are holding her back. So, there’s no limit to what kind of power grabs a President Harris could try to force through. Unfortunately, this isn’t an unlikely hypothetical.

It’s sad that we have to say it, but Biden is an elderly man who could have to give up the office at any moment. And now, with Harris waiting in the wings, the prospect of a Biden presidency is alarming indeed.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a freelance journalist and Washington Examiner contributor.