In Part I of this story we eliminated most of the 2020 Democrat presidential candidates and revealed who we think will represent Democrats in the 2020 race for President: Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA). I probably don’t need to say this, but I will: we don’t “know” she will be the pick. But based on our investigations of her personally, her political and private records, and her actions in her campaigning so far and the public’s reception of her and her ideals, she seems to be the cookie-cutter perfect choice for Democrats.
None of what we do here will be politically partisan. All know that TruthNewsNetwork is NOT representative of the Republican Party. I am NOT a registered Republican. Both TruthNewsNetwork collectively and I personally am conservative. Our representations in our writings and podcasts show that political perspective: sometimes I actually agree with some thoughts of those less conservative than I and relate those here. And, certainly, I don’t represent the political positions for anyone other than me. I just know many share the same thoughts and positions. Most importantly, they must, like me, have discovered over the last decade or so that few in the sector someone termed “Mainstream” present similar thoughts, ideas, and political positions as those with which I identify. That applies to many TruthNewsNetwork partners.
Today and in subsequent offerings here, we will give you truths about Senator Harris’ stances on particular issues that HAVE impacted Americans in dramatic ways in her political past and certainly WILL impact Americans going forward should she win the 2020 Democrat Party primary and the general election. Please note: there are MANY alarming things about the Senator. She’s been before the public in numerous settings in numerous ways for years now. She has a record. Fortunately, her record is much more readily available than some other candidates for us to examination. Examine her record we have — exhaustively — for months.
Let’s get right to the second ten (numbers 11 – 20) of the top issues surrounding the past of Senator Harris when serving in various capacities in her home state: California. Then join me for the summary to follow and thoughts about the race going forward.
Senator Kamala Harris: Her Past
11. Some have asked tough questions about whether Harris, as San Francisco district attorney, did everything she could to root out abuse in the local Catholic churches. Prosecutors had obtained personnel files from the Archdiocese of San Francisco dealing with sexual abuse going back decades. But her office did not prosecute any priests, and she argued that those records were not subject to public-records laws:
In 2005, while she was San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris rebuffed a public-records request by SF Weekly to release personnel files from the Archdiocese of San Francisco. (Her predecessor had planned to make them public after prosecuting criminal priests, but the California Supreme Court stopped those cases when it declared unconstitutional a 2002 law that lifted the criminal statute of limitations.) Similar archives in Boston had exposed the scope of the scandal there. “We’re not interested in selling out our victims to look good in the paper,” Harris told SF Weekly in a statement — this, even though many of those victims pleaded with her to release the documents.
12. In 2004, San Francisco Police officer Isaac Espinoza was shot and killed by David Hill, a young gang member with an AK-47. Hill also shot another officer in the leg. Days after Hill’s arrest, then-district attorney Harris announced that her office would not seek the death penalty. This prompted Senator Dianne Feinstein to declare while speaking at Espinoza’s funeral, “This is not only the definition of tragedy, it’s the special circumstance called for by the death-penalty law.” The comment drew a standing ovation from the crowd of mostly police. Hill was ultimately sentenced to life without parole. Feinstein later told reporters that if she’d known Harris was against the death penalty, she probably wouldn’t have endorsed her for D.A. in the first place.
In 2009, Harris again received criticism for refusing to pursue the death penalty against Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant, and member of MS-13 who gunned down a father and two sons. As a teenager, Ramos twice served probation for violent crimes but was not deported. Ramos was sentenced to 183-years-to-life without parole.
13. Harris’s most financially significant decision as state attorney general came in 2012 when she negotiated a $25 billion settlement deal with the nation’s five largest mortgage companies (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, CitiFinancial, GMAC/Ally Financial, and Wells Fargo) after the companies were accused of improper foreclosure practices.
By 2013, the state reported that California homeowners had received $18.4 billion in mortgage relief from the deal. When all was said and done, roughly 33,000 homeowners received an average reduction of $137,280 on their first mortgage. That sounds like a lot until one looks at the scale of the problem: More than 600,000 Californians received a foreclosure notice in 2009, and in 2012, when the agreement was struck, more than 30 percent of California homeowners with mortgages owed more than their houses were worth.
14. One bank that was not part of Harris’s settlement was California-based OneWest. A 2013 internal memo from the California attorney general’s office, first published by The Intercept, alleged that OneWest and its CEO, Steven Mnuchin, violated state foreclosure laws and recommended filing charges against him. Prosecutors claimed they had “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct” and “identified over a thousand legal violations.” But Harris, the state attorney general, did not pursue charges. She later told The Hill, “We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made. We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.” In 2016, Mnuchin — who would soon be President Trump’s nominee to be secretary of the treasury — donated $2,000 to Harris’s Senate campaign. She voted against his confirmation anyway.
15. For nearly ninety years, California state law prohibited images of handguns from being used in signs for gun stores. In 2014, after Harris’s office cited several gun shops, they sued, arguing that the law violated the First Amendment. Harris’s office argued that the law was needed to prevent handgun-related crime and suicide. Last year a federal judge ruled “the government has provided no evidence directly linking [the law] to reduced handgun suicide or crime,” concluded that the law was a “highly paternalistic approach to limiting speech,” and declared it “unconstitutional on its face.”
16. Starting in 1993, Harris began dating Willie Brown, then the speaker of the California Assembly and later a candidate for mayor of San Francisco — a relationship that brought her in contact with many of the city’s political and financial movers and shakers. Early in 1994, Brown named her as his appointee to the state’s Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, a job that paid $97,088 a year. Six months later, he named her to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a post which paid $72,000 a year.
In 1994, press accounts described Harris as Brown’s girlfriend. He was still married, and in his early 60s; she had just turned 30. The relationship had a surprising and tumultuous end, as James Richardson describes in Willie Brown: A Biography:
Columnist Herb Caen all but predicted two days after the election that Brown would wed Kamala Harris, his constant companion throughout the campaign. “Keep an eye on these two,” Caen wrote. No mention was made of what Brown would do about Blanche, to whom he was still married. But the day after Christmas, Brown stunned his friends by announcing that he was breaking up with Kamala. Brown invited Blanche to appear with him on stage for his swearing-in and to hold the Bible. A television reporter from KPIX caught up to Blanche, who had kept a low profile throughout the campaign, and asked her what it was like to live with the future mayor.
“Difficult,” was her one-word answer.
17. Late last year, Los Angeles city officials asked why “armed, plain-clothes LAPD officers were dispatched to California cities outside of Los Angeles at least a dozen times to provide security for U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris at public events.” LAPD officers traveled with Harris to San Francisco, Sacramento, Fresno, and San Diego. Los Angeles taxpayers covered about $28,000 of the cost for airline tickets, hotel stays, car rentals, and meals in an arrangement that retired law enforcement officers called “unprecedented.”
18. In 2009 and 2010, Harris contributed to the liberal blog Daily Kos, where she characterized the opposition to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as “bigotry and narrow-mindedness,” warned that Texas oil companies were “invading” California by funding efforts to repeal an initiative requiring reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, and opposed Arizona’s since-struck-down immigration law, declaring that we “can’t afford to divert scarce local law-enforcement resources to enforcing federal immigration laws.”
19. Harris has proposed a sweeping tax reform that would create a refundable tax credit for all workers, peaking at $3,000 for single adults and $6,000 for married couples — meaning that taxpayers could collect cash even if they don’t actually owe any taxes. The worth of the credit would decline the higher a taxpayer’s income, eventually reaching zero for childless single adults making more than $50,000 a year, single adults with children making more than $80,000 a year, and married couples with children making more than $100,000 a year. The plan would repeal all of the 2017 tax cuts for earners making more than $100,000, would cost roughly $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion over ten years, would constitute a serious marriage penalty, according to experts.
20. In April, Harris made an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, where the hostess asked, “If you had to be stuck in an elevator with either President Trump, Mike Pence, or Jeff Sessions, who would it be?” Harris replied, “Does one of us have to come out alive?”
Summary
Partisanship and identity politics may be sufficient to propel a candidate to a win in a party primary today. But will it be sufficient to score a victory in a general election? Obviously, the heavyweights at the Democrat National Committee think they can be successful with that philosophy. So far, EVERY candidate on both Democrat debate stages has espoused the most radical views on all-things American of any previous group of Democrat presidential candidates.
We have all heard “Democrats must campaign further left to win their primaries. Once named the Democrat Party nominee, they move to the center for the general election.” Doesn’t that seem quite hypocritical? What message do they send to Democrat primary voters? “I’m going to give free everything to everybody: healthcare, college tuition, reparations to descendants of American slaves, and a guaranteed income,” only to tell voters in the general election “I was just kidding. Everyone knows if elected, I’ll govern from the center to center-left?”
God forbid that in America, truth and actual policy issues as supported or rejected by candidates would mean less than talking points and political mantra from candidates for office. Democrats simply don’t get it: Americans are NOT stupid. We all watch, read, and listen to what candidates say and promise during primary AND general election seasons!
Or do these Democrat candidates think Americans — especially those in their own party — ARE stupid? That’s one WE cannot answer.
What do you think? Weigh-in by dropping me an email to Dan@TruthNewsNet.org. I’d like to hear your opinion.
A closing VERY important note: tomorrow we are sharing a critical analysis of what is REALLY going on regarding illegal immigration. I say “critical” because we now have a responsibility to make sure everyone in our circles of influence understands exactly what is happening regarding illegal immigration and exactly what and how Democrats are doing (or NOT doing) about it. You may have seen or heard the caustic remarks, derisive statements, and the outright lies that the 4 freshmen far-left Democrat Congresswomen had to say in their press conference regarding their stances on immigration while simultaneously denigrating President Trump. Much more about that tomorrow.
This is a shout-out to the nearly 1000 Russian students who are reading and listening to this story right now and today’s podcast as required by the Department Head of International Political Science at Moscow University. Tomorrow you can hear and read a genuine and specific analysis of the TRUTH of U.S. immigration. For everyone else, make sure to come back and read or listen (or both). You will want to share the story AND the podcast with those you know who may still be sitting on that “party fence” between Republican and Democrat parties. This is NOT a party election: it is an AMERICAN election.
You can download both the story and podcast for free and share as you like.
I’ll see you tomorrow!
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