Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), a leading candidate to be Joe Biden’s running mate, repeatedly and openly defied U.S. Supreme Court orders to reduce overcrowding in California prisons while serving as the state’s attorney general, according to legal documents reviewed by the Prospect. Working in tandem with Gov. Jerry Brown, Harris and her legal team filed motions that were condemned by judges and legal experts as obstructionist, bad-faith, and nonsensical, at one point even suggesting that the Supreme Court lacked the jurisdiction to order a reduction in California’s prison population.
The intransigence of this legal work resulted in the presiding judges in the case giving serious consideration to holding the state in contempt of court. Observers worried that the behavior of Harris’s office had undermined the very ability of federal judges to enforce their legal orders at the state level, pushing the federal court system to the brink of a constitutional crisis. This extreme resistance to a Supreme Court ruling was done to prevent the release of fewer than 5,000 nonviolent offenders, whom multiple courts had cleared as presenting next to no risk of recidivism or threat to public safety.
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This era of Harris’s tenure as attorney general escaped the recent close re-examination of some of the higher-profile cases in her prosecutorial past. During her brief presidential run, a memo from the tail end of this battle resurfaced; in late 2014, lawyers from her office claimed that nonviolent offenders needed to stay incarcerated, lest they lose bodies for fire camps in the wildfire-plagued state, as Jackie Kucinich of the Daily Beast reported.
Harris was quick to disavow the memo, claiming she had no knowledge of it and telling BuzzFeed News she was “shocked” by the argument. But it squares firmly with the sort of arguments her office was putting forward for multiple years preceding it. Harris, meanwhile, was known to run an extremely centralized attorney general’s office, with few things coming in or going out without her express sign-off. With a ruling handed down from the country’s highest court, this was one of the highest-profile cases she managed in her role as attorney general. An extremely high-stakes case involving a decarceration order she spent years resisting is unlikely to have escaped her awareness.
So, at the least, she'd be just as bad as Biden about "I don't care what the courts say, this is what I want to do!" Ain't that a wonderful thought.
4 comments:
Pretty much all demonrats ignore court rulings they don't like.
Russians in the USSR used to say "We know the future, it's the past that's always changing". Any facts inconvenient to the democrat party elite will be disappeared and denied, accompanied by accusations of racism, sexism, etc. against anyone crass enough to point them out.
American Pravda. No, you don't hate them enough.
I noticed the name Jackie Kucinich, and checked it out. She is the daughter of Dennis Kucinich.
So, there IS hope for the younger generations in Leftist families.
There are two possibilities:
1) Harris sent her staff lawyers to court to argue for slavery.
2) Harris lost control of her staff to the point that they decided on their own to go to court and argue for slavery.
She claims #2, which means she claims incompetence in managing the small staff that a state attorney general needs. How will she manage the huge Presidential staff?
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