Analysis

From Prosecutor To VP Candidate: How Harris Got Here

Law360 (August 11, 2020, 9:21 PM EDT) -- Being named Joe Biden's running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket is just the latest achievement for Sen. Kamala Harris, the California Democrat who cut her teeth as a prosecutor before bursting onto the national political scene in recent years.

Biden announced his vice presidential candidate Tuesday on Twitter, calling her a "fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country's finest public servants." Harris, 55, would be the first African American and South Asian American to hold the office.


Long a legal star in California, where she rose from a county prosecutor to state attorney general, Harris became a household name in 2016 when she took over Barbara Boxer's seat in the U.S. Senate. She was only the second African American woman and first South Asian American to join the chamber.

Harris gained more recognition after she won a prized seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the panel that vets and votes on the president's judicial nominees and plays a role in criminal justice policy. Despite a lack of seniority, Harris quickly became one of its most active interrogators, clashing with U.S. Supreme Court nominees, administration officials and others.

She played a leading role in the showdown over Justice Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, leading the charge against the longtime D.C. Circuit judge.

During the initial Kavanaugh hearings, Harris made headlines with a provocative line of questioning about whether the nominee had any contacts with the law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, whose founder briefly represented President Donald Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election interference.

The former prosecutor interrogated Kavanaugh for several minutes about whether he spoke with anyone from the firm about the matter, with Kavanaugh looking perplexed by the question and asking her to divulge whether she had any more specific information. The firm later denied that any of its attorneys had any contact with then-Judge Kavanaugh about Mueller's investigation and Harris quietly abandoned the inquiry, but not before the exchange went viral on social media.

Harris became a staunch defender of Christine Blasey Ford after she came forward during the confirmation process to accuse Justice Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her while the two were high schoolers in the early 1980s. Harris called the Ford hearing a "sham process" and honored the professor in an article for Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" series.

The California senator has also clashed with the White House over other judicial nominees, opposing several of Trump's picks for her home state's seats on the influential Ninth Circuit.

Like Biden, Harris came to politics from the practice of law, starting her career as a prosecutor after graduating from University of California, Hastings College of the Law. As deputy district attorney in Alameda County for eight years in the 1990s, she specialized in child sexual assault cases and also prosecuted robbery and homicide cases.

She was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003 after a campaign based in part on her opposition to the death penalty. That position was tested shortly after she took office with the killing of 29-year-old police officer Isaac Espinoza. Harris announced that she would seek a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for David Hill, the 21-year-old gang member suspected of his killing. The move caught Espinoza's widow off guard and drew a rebuke from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., at the slain officer's funeral.

When Feinstein said the crime deserved capital punishment, the police in attendance reportedly gave a standing ovation. Hill was sentenced to life without parole and recently told CNN that being spared the death penalty showed he was not irredeemable.

"Once she became the San Francisco DA, that's a position that came with statewide notoriety in legal circles," said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles.

Harris became California's attorney general in 2010 and won a reputation as a corporate watchdog after taking on banks for home foreclosures and tech companies for digital privacy policies. She also made environmental policies a key part of her tenure, intervening against a San Diego County agency's $200 billion long-term regional transportation plan, which Harris successfully argued ignored the California Environmental Quality Act's greenhouse gas regulations.

Levinson said that Harris owes some of her success to being in the "right place at the right time." In her race for attorney general, she capitalized on a complacent campaign from early favorite Steve Cooley. She also avoided a tough primary in her 2016 Senate race, "and the general election is a fait accompli in California when it comes to the Senate," Levinson said.

In 2014, Harris married Douglas C. Emhoff, a prominent entertainment lawyer at DLA Piper. In 2019, Harris criticized the firm's policy of requiring employees to arbitrate employment-based legal claims, after an attorney for an accuser urged the presidential candidate to condemn the practice.

The daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, Harris has often spoken about having to straddle racial lines while growing up in the 1960s and '70s. On the campaign trail last year, Harris confronted Biden's record on race during the Democratic debate in June 2019, asking the former vice president, "Do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America?" Biden said she was mischaracterizing his record and noted that while she worked as a prosecutor, he served as a public defender.

Their relationship improved and Harris joined a growing chorus of former Democratic candidates to endorse Biden in March, saying he has "served our country with dignity and we need him now more than ever."

Levinson said that during the presidential primary last year, voters nationwide picked up on what Californians have long identified as Harris' weak spot: She is a careful politician.

According to Levinson, Harris will have to heed the lessons of her unsuccessful run and "become looser, more open, more transparent and less leery of the press."

"All of those things will serve her well as a vice presidential nominee," she said. "She has a more relaxed position making the case for somebody else. In fact, that's kind of what prosecutors do. It's not arguing that I should win, it's that my case should win."

--Additional reporting by Mike LaSusa. Editing by Breda Lund and Emily Kokoll.

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