Favorite Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris misrepresented her record again as a prosecutor in San Francisco, this time on illegal aliens, and for the first time, CNN has called her out.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris this week mischaracterized a 2008 policy she supported that led to undocumented [sic] minors who were arrested for suspected felonies being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement before they had been convicted of crimes.
Speaking to an audience in Iowa Sunday on Political Party Live a podcast about Iowa politics, Harris was asked by host Misty Rebik about a CNN KFile report detailing Harris' public support for a citywide policy enacted by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom of reporting juvenile undocumented immigrants [sic] arrested by local police to ICE. The decision revoked a previous policy of non-reporting.
In her answer, Harris called the reporting of arrested juvenile undocumented immigrants [sic] before they were convicted of a felony an "unintended consequence" of the policy that she did not support. However, this was in fact the intent of the policy.
The problem, CNN notes, is that it wasn't an "unintended consequence"; it was the actual policy, and when leftists on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors tried to end it, Harris opposed them.
What was this likely about? I'm gonna guess MS-13 gangbangers wreaking havoc in the South of Market and the Mission District and angry hipsters trying to gentrify the area wanting something done about it. Since I used to live there in the 1990s, I can tell you that those thugs were very much a presence and, through their involvement in the drug- and human-trafficking trades, brought a lot of blight to the area. This included hookers and drug-dealers, surrounded by bums buying their "products" but also a lot of robbery and violence. I remember once jerking back behind a cement warehouse wall when I saw muzzle flashes from firing weapons on a street whose buildings were covered with MS-13 graffiti.
Harris would have been taking the side of the progressive hipster entrepreneurs over the gangbangers at the time (you can see here that it's always an ongoing struggle) and for that reason, she would have wanted to turn the underage gangbangers over to ICE as a local prosecutor to cool things down a bit.
Now she's changed her tune as she runs for president, and, in line with the current progressive mantra, says she's against turning anyone under 18 here illegally over to ICE after he's been picked up by the cops for some foul crime, including murder, until after a jury convicts. Maybe not even that. She's relabeling herself as that, using this stumbling argument from the same CNN report:
"Could you kind of give us some insight on how, from that time, when for whatever reason you were supporting this policy that was essentially handing over undocumented people to ICE before they had been convicted to now — kind of what's changed on that and how you came to those changes?" the questioner asked Harris.
Harris responded, "That ended up being an unintended consequence of the policy and I did not support that consequence of that policy. And that policy I believe has since changed because it was not the intended purpose of that policy. I'll say this, and I feel very strongly about it, and I always have, which is this, my background is as a prosecutor and I want to know that a person, a victim of a rape or a child molestation, or a vicious violent crime, I want to know that that victim will be able to run in the middle of the street and wave down a police officer and receive protection and security without having to worry about if they do that they will be deported."
CNN, which supports the national progressive line of no consequences for illegal aliens, apparently found this too much, and came out with its critical piece highlighting Harris's inability to stick to her story.
It's not the first time she's done that, either. It's got to be tough work to try to de-market oneself as a tough prosecutor, and have it all ways with the left, but here she is. Reason's Hit & Run blog has the best write-up of the complicated twists and turns of the self-described progressive's stands:
This is yet another instance of Harris massaging her record as a prosecutor. As I wrote in a review, Harris' new memoir emphasizes her record as a "progressive prosecutor" while failing to address or in any meaningful way account for the numerous instances when her office defended dirty prosecutors and opposed efforts to correct wrongful convictions.
My colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown has also written extensively about Harris' overzealous prosecutions of sex workers and websites that hosted them. Yesterday, Harris appeared to say she is now in favor of decriminalizing sex work.
The reality here is that she was involved in San Francisco's utterly wretched blue-on-blue politics, and she blew with the prevailing winds at the time. What we learn from this Reason list is that she will take the side of whichever progressive line seems most powerful, which at that earlier time seemed to be to get rid of the gangbangers so that the businesses (and San Francisco tax base) could flourish, and that would explain why she would have supported deportations of under-18s picked up by the cops for criminal activity at the time. Now that the trend has shifted, and Democrats have moved to open borders over all other priorities, she misrepresents her record, saying she that was never in favor of deportations of "unaccompanied minors."
Which is pretty weird when you think about it. Harris actually could use her record to show she's a moderate of sorts on matters of law and order, and that she has responded to neighborhood requests to throw out illegal alien gangbangers as a prosecutor. Yet she doesn't. In fact, she misrepresents her record in that same pattern and she's done it often enough that she's getting noticed for it.
Now CNN, which, along with the New York Times, has been her fiercest booster, has called her out. It's possible that this outlet is trying to recover its own reputation for impartial news by delivering the hit on Kamala, after that adoring tweet from a CNN correspondent showing reporters picking out Harris's clothing in a boutique. But that doesn't make the critical call-out any less valid.
And what it shows is that Harris is not really ready for prime time. Up until now, Harris has been a hothouse flower of a candidate, cossetted by reporters and coming up through the political ranks in San Francisco's one-party state, ushered in by her relationship with political kingpin Willie Brown. That's not a background that makes for a tough politician able to withstand a lot of pressure from opponents or take tough questions from real reporters. Up until now, she's had it good.
Now with her record exposed as phony, we are seeing Harris herself finally being exposed as phony. Apparently, she's made one mistake too many.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/has_kamala_harris_made_one_blunder_too_many.html
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