Has she got guts

The earth, as I have observed in my garden, is in a constant state of renewal. That is also true, it seems, of politics in America.

The $200 million raised by Kamala Harris in her first week is a sign that a renewal may be underway. And the tattooed twenty-something waitress at my local pub was actually jumping with enthusiasm last weekend.

While Harris stands as a rejuvenating oasis in the political desert dominated by her opponent — and I will support her with a contribution — still, a doubting devil sits on my shoulder. 

I was convinced until recently that Harris was not electable, haughty and affected, with no touch for the people. While mostly gone, there is a bit of that that lingers. It has to do with a column I wrote in this space many years ago criticizing her policies when she was California’s attorney general.

So I went to our website at Courthouse News and was able to find my piece from 2015 titled “What’s Up With Kamala.”

It was a story about using the weight of her office to defend bad actors in law enforcement without any underlying prosecutorial discretion. It involved a ruling by Judge William Shubb in the Eastern District.

An old man had been pulled over by the California Highway Patrol for driving just under the speed limit — a bit too slow for the CHP — who heard his slurred speech and thought he was drunk. The 76-year-old had recently had a stroke, which he explained to the patrolmen who tested him and confirmed he had not been drinking.

But the young patrolmen arrested the old man anyway, and when he objected to being handcuffed, because he had difficulty with his balance, one of the patrolmen punched him in the face and knocked him down. Then, the two fools manufactured the charge that the 76-year-old was resisting arrest.

But the ruling included something I had never seen before. The judge had put the punching patrolman’s photo into his opinion. Shubb, as I saw it, was sending a message. The guy should not be carrying a badge.

The jury awarded damages for excessive force which the circumstances obviously supported. But the AG’s office continued to argue that the CHP officer was fully justified in knocking the old man to the ground, and asked for reconsideration.

“The ‘crimes’ at issue could hardly have been more minor. There was no evidence that plaintiff posed any appreciable threat to the officers’ safety. Plaintiff was a 76-year old disabled man confronted by two young officers,” wrote Shubb.

“Although the Attorney General persists in attempting to defend it, neither the jury nor the court can find any justification for that blow.”

Harris was running for U.S. senator and had no appreciable opposition. She was going to be California’s senator. So I asked at the time, “Why would the first female attorney general in California, born of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, persist in defending a patrolman who punched a disabled and elderly man, and followed up with a false accusation.”

The AG’s office is a big place but I have now had way too much experience with state bureaucracies that reflexively defend their most ossified and conservative policies — and spend huge amounts of public money doing so — without regard to the public mantle they wear, the power given to them by the American people.

That experience tells me that their basic policies really do come from the top, and in the case of the state courts, that where the chief justice leads, the bureaucracy follows.

So the policies pursued by the AG’s office during her tenure still sit on her doorstep. It’s true that in the crazy rat-race that is this shortened presidential campaign season, they will most likely never make it to the stage.

But I have not seen anything that would change my conclusion from almost ten years ago: “It takes courage to buck the machine, to punish rather than protect those who would punch and falsely accuse a helpless old man. This case was a chance for Attorney General Harris to demonstrate some of that courage, and she showed none of it.”

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