Blue State Blues: Kamala Harris, Serial Abuser of Power

The one thing to know about Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) is that whenever she has a tiny bit of power, she abuses it.

In introducing Harris on Wednesday, former Vice President Joe Biden said that she was a fighter for the “little guy.” But he gave no examples — because there are none.

There are plenty of examples of Harris fighting against the “little guy.”

The most egregious example is her malicious prosecution of filmmaker and anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, who made undercover videos of Planned Parenthood employees discussing how to make money from the sale of tissue from aborted fetuses.

It was the first and only time undercover journalists had been prosecuted under an obscure California law.

Worse, Harris reportedly acted after meeting with Planned Parenthood, which was apparently upset that Daleiden had caught their employees in the act. The abortion group also wanted the videos suppressed. Daleiden says that when the state executed its search warrant on his home, its purpose was to seize unpublished videos to make sure they were never released.

Harris, he said, colluded with a powerful left-wing interest group to abuse the First Amendment and punish him for exposing it.

So much for fighting for the “little guy.”

Harris also abused the powers of her office to target a political opponent. It was part of a pattern. She attempted to force Americans for Prosperity, a 501(c)4 group supported by the Koch brothers, to reveal its donors, though they are already known to the federal Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Harris tried to do at the state level what the IRS scandal had done throughout the country: bully and intimidate a conservative group.

A district judge agreed that allowing Harris to accept the donor lists would allow “harassment” and could suppress the group’s constitutionally-protected liberties. That judgment was overturned by the Ninth Circuit, and the case is pending before the Supreme Court.

What remains noteworthy about the case is Harris’s behavior: singling out a conservative, pro-business group for legal intimidation. Ironically, the 501(c)4 rules protected the NAACP during the civil rights struggle.

Once she arrived in the U.S. Senate, Harris continued her abusive behavior. She developed a habit of badgering witnesses and then turning her questioning into viral YouTube videos to raise campaign cash.

Occasionally, this tactic backfired, as when she grilled Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing about whether he had discussed the Russia “collusion” investigation. Laughably, she had no evidence; even the left-wing California media panned her performance.

The most shocking example came in 2018, when Harris used a confirmation hearing for Ronald Vitiello, who had been nominated to lead the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, to compare ICE to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

In an outrageous exchange, Harris accused ICE — which exists to enforce federal immigration laws the Senate itself has passed — of being like racist vigilantes who lynched black Americans. She had no evidence, only “perceptions.”

Far from fighting for the vulnerable, Harris has been accused of protecting abusers — most notably, declining to prosecute priests for sexual abuse when she was San Francisco’s district attorney. She was the only DA from a major city to refrain.

In the days since former Vice President Joe Biden picked Harris to be his running mate, conservatives have had a field day mocking the New York Times for calling her a “pragmatic moderate.”

Harris is no pragmatist, no record of working across party lines. She was rated by the non-partisan GovTrack as the #1 most left-wing member of the Senate, further left than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

The main basis for claiming she is a “moderate” appears to be that she is a former prosector. But so, too, is Kim Foxx, the George Soros-funded radical notorious for dropping the charges against Jussie Smollett in Chicago after he faked a hate crime and blamed it on Trump supporters.

There is nothing intrinsically “conservative” or “moderate” about being a prosecutor, even if the current politics of the Democratic Party and Black Lives Matter are hostile to law enforcement. Harris, like many Democrats in politics, saw the prosecutor’s job as a political stepping stone.

When Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) took Harris to task at the second Democratic debate last year, it was not just because Harris had taken a tough approach to marijuana offenders, but because she had laughed later about having smoked pot herself.

The attack resonated because it was an example of Harris abusing her power. She was willing to put thousands of people in jail for breaking a law she did not believe in herself because doing so would burnish her political credentials.

Another basis for claiming Harris is a “moderate” is that she is a creation of the Democratic Party political establishment. She got her start in politics from her association with California State Assembly leader and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. She won her Senate seat in 2016 with the help of the Bay Area liberal gentry and national Democratic leaders, including then-President Barack Obama. After the 2016 election, Harris tapped into Hillary Clinton’s donor network.

But the “woke” Democratic Party establishment is no longer politically “moderate.”

As Shadi Hamid noted in the Wall Street Journal in 2018, it was the Democratic establishment that became most politically extreme after Donald Trump won in 2016, embracing “Russia collusion” conspiracy theories and the like.

The establishment — of both parties — will adopt any outward political stance to protect its power. And Kamala Harris has a career-long habit of abusing hers.

Harris represents a clear and present danger to liberty in an era when the Democratic Party is siding with violent mobs and vowing to sweep away all obstacles to its power if it wins the November elections. Harris actually joined protests outside the White House on May 30, the same day that demonstrators there assaulted a Breitbart News journalist and others. Back home in California, antisemitic Black Lives Matter mobs were rioting through the heart of Los Angeles.

Biden is promising that he will “fundamentally transform” the country, which he says needs “revolutionary institutional changes.” Harris, too, said Wednesday that she intends to overhaul a system afflicted by “systemic” racial injustice. And Obama called for eliminating the Senate filibuster to allow Democrats to do whatever they want.

If Republicans continue to block progress, I’ll get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal. #ClimateTownHall

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 4, 2019

If Harris would be, as many suspect, running a Biden administration from “day one,” the freedom of every American citizen would be at risk.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.