Biden Backs the Blue with VP Pick

Biden picks ‘top cop’ to be his running mate against Trump despite movement to Defund Police.

On Tuesday, August 11^th, 2020 presumptive Democratic nominee and former-Vice President Joe Biden chose his running mate to face off against Donald Trump & Mike Pence in the 2020 presidential race. Less than a week before the virtual Democratic National Convention, Biden chose California Senator & former California Attorney General Kamala Harris as his running mate. Biden promised back in March that he would chose a female running mate, the third time in U.S. history a female has been chosen to run in a presidential election by a major party.¹ Harris was chosen amongst a sea of potential female prospects including: former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, former-gubernatorial candidate for Georgia Stacey Abrams, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, and several lesser known possibilities as well. Ultimately, Kamala Harris was chosen becoming the first Black woman & Asian women to be nominated for the vice-presidency.²

For such a diverse choice, it is only fitting the responses be equally diverse. The choice quickly brought back wounds from this years Democratic primary splitting the progressive/Leftist group between those willing to settle for Biden/Harris just to see Trump out of office and those unwilling to support another neo-liberal Democratic candidate (especially two extremely pro-police choices). Most liberal Democrats were elated with the choice because Harris checks off so many symbolic boxes that liberals love to claim they support.³

The most hilarious responses came from Trump & Fox News; they vacillated haphazardly between describing her as a socialist foreigner taking her orders from the radical mob and describing her as a pro-corporate, pro-police shill that is a slap in the face to Bernie Sanders supporters. “So Harris is simultaneously proof that the ‘left-wing mob’ is taking over the Democratic Party and that the Biden campaign is embracing radical socialism, yet she is also a thumb in the eye of the people who support such policies and will let Wall Street run rampant.”

In a CNN Op-ed, civil rights attorney Ben Crump had nothing but praise for the Senator. “The case for me is simple: She’s been a change agent at every level of government — local, state, and federal — for 30 years… The truth is, Harris has been unraveling broken systems and confronting injustice since long before most people knew her name.”

Often referred to as the female Obama for her neo-liberal charm and tactical political maneuvers, she frequently inflates small actions in ways which overshadow her blatant attempts at protecting the corrupt systems she claims to be against. Going into every detail is beyond the scope of this article, though for an extensive analysis of her political history one should read Jacobin’s article on Harris. I will only look at her relationship with the criminal justice system since her career prior to the U.S. Senate (2017-present) was as the Attorney General for California (2011-2017) and District Attorney for San Francisco (2004-2011).

Harris ran for the Democratic nomination for President this year, doing well in the first couple debates, but never made it to a primary. She said in a statement, “My entire career has been spent making needed reforms and fighting for those who too often are voiceless — from young people arrested for the first time and getting them jobs instead of jail, to grieving black mothers who wanted justice for their child’s murder as the system ignored their pain,” said Harris before touting her own criminal justice reform plan. “This plan uses my experience and unique capability to root out failures within the justice system. As president I’ll fix this broken system to make it fairer and more accountable for communities across the country.”

As San Francisco DA, she started a new re-entry program for drug offenders that reduced the recidivism rate to less than 10% over a two year period, while California as a whole had a 53% recidivism rate for drug offenders. Ben Crump writes: “She prioritized reopening cold cases by creating a special unit, partnered with community leaders to open a safe house for victims of human trafficking and established an LGBT Victim Advocacy Unit to focus on hate crimes committed against LGBT individuals. As the attorney general of California, she launched a certified procedural justice and implicit bias training course for police officers — the first of its kind. Under her leadership, California’s DOJ also became the first statewide agency in the country to mandate body cameras, and she created ‘Open Justice,’ a publicly accessible database that included deaths in police custody and arrest rates.”

Harris even took a very unpopular stance against the death penalty. When a 21-year old David Hill killed undercover police officer Isaac Espinoza, Harris stood alone against enormous political pressure to punish Hill with the death penalty. Senators Diane Feinstein & Barbara Boxer, the San Francisco police Chief, the mayor, and a barrage of other powerful political voices attempted to crucify the young prosecutor for her anti-death penalty stance. Harris didn’t budge. “At the very start of her career, Harris defied her own party, her city’s police department, and endured public humiliation to defy reactionary demands.”

However, these are just the very shiny & alluring tips of the iceberg. Underneath is a far more problematic history than Harris is willing to admit. Despite her unpopular stance with one particular offender regarding the death penalty, in general she did the exact opposite defending its use in the courts as it was repeatedly challenged.

Harris has talked a good game with regards to criminal justice reform, repeatedly arguing its not about the difference between soft-on-crime & tough-on-crime but between being smart-on-crime (President Obama began using the phrase smart-on-crime towards the end of his presidency). Smart-on-crime is merely the latest neo-liberal triangulation reframing tough-on-crime policies as less barbaric with a new name and fancy new technology. “Getting Smart on Crime does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes,” Harris argued in her 2009 book, Smart on crime: a career prosecutor’s plan to make us safer. As her website used to outline, “Kamala believes that we must maintain a relentless focus on reducing violence and aggressively prosecuting violent criminals.” According to Jacobin, Harris’s tenure as San Francisco DA oversaw an increase in the felony conviction rate from 52 percent to 67 percent in three years.

Furthermore, Harris advocated against various propositions aimed at ending California’s 3 strike law which greatly contributed to an explosion in the prison population. While she in general practiced restraint in sentencing third-strikers to life in prison for minor crimes, her opposition to the overturning of 3 strikes altogether left the door wide open for future, more bullish prosecutors to take advantage of it.

Harris championed a state-wide version of an anti-truancy policy she popularized in San Francisco. The controversial policy threatened the parents of chronically truant children with up to $2000 in fines and a year in jail. At least two women were imprisoned because of this policy.

Harris said this when she was elected to District Attorney: “We are putting parents on notice. If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”

I could go on & on, about how she didn’t support ending solitary confinement in California’s prisons, didn’t support ending cash bail (despite saying she does now), she blocked a trans inmate’s request for gender reassignment surgery, objected to releasing prisoners under a court order because “releasing inmates early would deprive the state of incarcerated workers making slavery wages as low as $2 a day to fight wildfires,” and so much more.

Perhaps the most telling example of Harris’s neo-liberal slight-of-hand (where she says or does something just with one hand while defending the unjust criminal justice system with the other) was her handling of sex abuse cases from the Catholic church when she was San Francisco DA. Lee Fang reports: “Fighting on behalf of victims of sexual abuse, particularly children, has been central to Harris’s political identity for the better part of three decades. Harris specialized in prosecuting sex crimes and child exploitation as a young prosecutor just out of law school. She later touted her record on child sexual abuse cases and prosecuting pedophiles in television advertisements, splashy profiles, and on the trail as she campaigned for public office.”

However, when it came to dealing with the systemic and prolonged child rape crimes by the Catholic Church, a powerful and wealthy institution to a politician, she left abuse survivors hanging. Under the previous administration of District Attorney Terence Hallinan, the DA’s office aggressively pursued the endless crimes of the Catholic church. Even after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a California law retroactively removing the statute of limitations on criminal liability for sex crimes, Hallinan actively used the institutional power of the DA’s office to investigate child rape claims and make this information available to survivors for use in civil cases. One survivor, Joey Piscitelli, said, “It went from Terence Hallinan going hundred miles an hour, full speed ahead, after the Catholic Church to Kamala Harris doing absolutely nothing and taking it backwards hundred miles an hour.” The Intercept reported: “In her seven years as district attorney, Harris’s office did not proactively assist in civil cases against clergy sex abuse and ignored requests by activists and survivors to access the cache of investigative files that could have helped them secure justice, according to several victims of clergy sex abuse living in California who spoke to The Intercept.”

It was easy for Harris to fight pedophiles when it involved politically impotent individuals with no real power; but, when it came to battling a politically powerful juggernaut like the Catholic Church, she folded like a bad hand.

And, after nearly three months of sustained protests by Black Lives Matter activists against the brutalities of state violence by police, one might be wondering why Sleepy Joe picked Kamala as his running mate, a politician who affectionately referred to herself as California’s ‘top cop’ and said in her 2009 book that that liberals need to move beyond “biases against law enforcement.” So, why did you choose these things Joe? Kamala was chosen as Joe’s running mate because Trump is going around saying Biden wants to abolish police (which is just absurd on every level).⁴ Once again, the Democrats are allowing the right to set the terms of the debate. When it comes to battling Trump, relying on the epistemological reality of the actual world is not particularly effective. During the primary, progressives were told Biden was better than Bernie Sanders because the GOP would attack Sanders on socialism relentlessly. But, they’ve attacked Sleepy Joe just as much claiming he’s a socialist controlled by left-wing mobs (which is also just absurd).⁵

From the top down, Democrats fundamentally support police power and unbridled state violence. They’ll say they want reform; but, reform to them just means more money and more tech for cops instead of investing in working people’s communities. They have no interest in actually building the welfare state into a solidarity state. Same austere neo-liberalism, same faces it’s always been. Police violence is ubiquitous even in Democrat run cities.

Last year, I would have sworn Biden had no chance of winning against Trump. But, after the pandemic & Trump’s handling of a post-George Floyd landscape, it seems more & more likely Biden will win in November. And, it’s hard to begrudge people who are willing to settle for Biden just to get rid of Trump. Ben Crump says, “I won’t parse words: A second Trump term scares the hell out of me. I can’t stop imagining the onslaught of racism, corruption and injustice we’d all endure, with Black folks as always bearing an outsized burden.” Trump has done immeasurable damage to the U.S.’s institutions very rapidly putting the nation on the road to a neo-fascist regime. With Trump already threatening to post-pone the 2020 November election, purposely slow down the USPS to hamper absentee voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, said he’s not sure whether he’ll accept the results if he loses to Biden, and his ridiculous claims he deserves a third term because of the impeachment, a 2^nd term for Trump could allow him to cement the fascist road we’ve been on and proclaim himself a dictator. Removing Trump is indeed an existential decision that must be done. As someone who has the privilege of living in a non-swing state⁶ my vote for president doesn’t matter. But, people who do live in swing states should vote for Biden this November if they want to see Trump out of office.

Whether Kamala Harris will help Sleepy Joe defeat Trump has yet to be seen. But, the argument that a more progressive pick would have been bait for the GOP, doesn’t really hold up; the GOP doesn’t need to exist in reality for their supporters to follow them unquestionably. Finally, Joe Biden’s own history as the architect of mass incarceration and his pledge to increase police spending coupled with Harris as his VP pick is unlikely to convince activists who have been fighting in the streets to Defund the police and end mass incarceration that a Biden/Harris administration would be anything but an enemy to real change. Biden’s pick of Harris is essentially the same triangulation Bill Clinton performed in the 1990s where he swore to be more tough-on-crime than any Republican. This time, he’s throwing a symbolic bone to liberals who praise diversity of identities more so than a diversity of policies. As Socialist Alternative described the VP pick, it’s the “How to Talk Left without Moving.”

This article was originally published on Strangecornersofthought.com.

1. The first was Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 who ran with Democratic candidate Walter Mondale against President Reagan & Vice-President George H.W. Bush. The second was Sarah Palin in 2008 who ran with Republican candidate John McCain against then-Senators Barack Obama & Joe Biden. Both Ferraro & Palin lost their bids for the White House.
2. Harris’s mother is of Indian descent.
3. First African-American, first woman and first Asian-American to become attorney general of California; first South Asian-American attorney general in the nation; first Indian-American and second African-American woman to serve as a senator; first African-American woman to represent California in the Senate; she is the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants; grew up attending a black Baptist church and a Hindu temple; her name comes from the Sanskrit word meaning “lotus” flower.
4. Biden has actually called for increasing Federal funding for police by an additional $300 million.
5. Biden has called for protesters to be arrested and held accountable to the law.
6. Illinois, a long with 37 other states, are safe states.