As the only black woman in the Senate, Kamala Harris brings Joe Biden the bevy of diversity begged for by his base as well as national name recognition and a vast fundraising machine. She will also bring Donald Trump enough ammunition that he might actually manage to eke out another surprise victory.
Team Biden’s woes begin with Kamala’s days as the crooked top cop of San Francisco and then California and span through her own failed presidential campaign that flamed out months before the Iowa caucuses. Here is just a sampling of opposition research you can surely expect Team Trump to cut into ads for the next three months:
For starters, Harris has repeatedly misled about her own conduct as a prosecutor. The notoriously anti-marijuana prosecutor bragged on The Breakfast Club that she smoked while listening to Tupac and Snoop Dogg, but neither dropped their debut albums until Harris was well into her career as deputy district attorney in Alameda County, when she was cracking down on nonviolent drug offenders. Harris also falsely claimed that no parents went to jail as a result of her anti-truancy push, when in actuality, her crucial sponsorship of SB 1317, a state bill making truancy a misdemeanor and modeled specifically on her office’s policy, resulted in multiple parents across California going to jail.
Then, there’s the matter of Harris’s job as senator, which was transparently a four-year audition for president. Harris’s tenure has been thin on legislation, though she did back Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist Green New Deal and flirted with backing Medicare For All during her campaign, and heavy on publicity stunts. Harris famously earned a stunning rebuke from Tulsi Gabbard for her quasi-litmus tests meant to discriminate against religious judicial appointees, and her tenure on the Senate Judiciary Committee came with her embarrassing display during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
Harris’s own presidential bid against Biden will provide ample ammunition for Trump. Consider, while Harris was trying to smear Biden as a racist for failing to back federally mandated busing, a stance she didn’t even believe, Biden dominated the majority of the black vote. So, not only will Harris not likely improve black voter turnout, but she also probably won’t motivate more turnout among women, with which she flamed out in the primary.
Hell, Trump can also target Harris from the left. After all, Kamala supported ICE targeting illegal immigrant students and separating them from their parents, threatened to lock up the mothers of truant children and put prostitutes at greater risk as attorney general of California, went out of her way to target transgender prisoners, pushed to apply the state’s “three strikes” law against nonviolent offenders while district attorney of San Francisco, and refused to prosecute child molesters in the Catholic Church.
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.
And don’t think for a second that Trump won’t comment on Harris’s extramarital relationship with San Francisco king (and queen) maker Willie Brown, who also gifted her two patronage positions in state government — her first stepping stone into politics.
Get ready for the next three months. Biden just handed Trump a lifeline with the baggage brought by Harris to his ticket, and this election is about to get even uglier.
