The country screams #defundpolice and Biden gives us Top Cop for VP
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| Kamala Harris, Top Cop. Is #ACAB still a thing? // public domain |
Well, I was wrong and my nightmare has come true.
The country is still reeling from the George Floyd murder and in the middle of peak distrust of the police. The prevailing hashtags that have defined the past few months are #BlackLivesMatter and #DefundPolice. The Democrats already had Joe Biden as the presidential nominee, the person as responsible for writing bills to expand police power as anyone in Congress. And now the strategy is to pick Kamala Harris, the overzealous prosecutor who has destroyed countless black lives?
Are the Democrats trying to give the presidency away to Donald Trump??
Either the Biden campaign is incredibly confident, thinking there is no way their base will abandon them with Trump on the other side, or incredibly stupid that they don't see the problem. Maybe both.
In a year where curbing excessive police force is in the national limelight, the Democrats have to offer this guy:
Oh, Joe Biden. The gift that keeps on giving. Biden is famous for and by his rhetoric, immensely proud of, his 1994 Biden Crime Bill which helped drive up incarceration rates in federal and state prisons, which he said in 2008 that he knew it would do. Violent crime rates had actually peaked several years prior to the passing of his bill. While Vox may be more or less correct that mass incarceration cannot be directly pinned solely on his crime bill, its major defense is that few states adopted the Biden's crime bill. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. The article goes on to say that Biden at the very least, encouraged and pushed for higher incarceration rates, even if the crime bill specifically did not do the entirety of it.
Maybe if he stopped there and later admitted to his mistake, it could be forgiven. But he didn't admit to his mistake; he said he never regretted the bill. He has bragged that the Patriot Act, the steaming pile of Orwellian trash was based largely on a bill of his from 1994. He bragged that every crime bill, major or minor since 1976 had his name on it. He increased mandatory minimums, even stating that he didn't care if there was no criminal intent in violating a law, there would still be a minimum prison sentence that can be extended for decades. He introduced 60 new violations that would result in the death penalty in a feverish attempt to look more "tough on crime" than the Republicans that were already terrible on the issue. He essentially created the framework of civil asset forfeiture, a state system that literally steals people's money and possessions even if the person is not charged with a crime.
Joe Biden played a major role in getting police enforcement into this military-style behemoth that consistently abuses civil rights at every turn.
But he was nominated before the George Floyd incident. Let's give the Democrats the benefit of the doubt, despite libertarians trying to get them to notice police civil rights abuses for decades to which they responded by doing nothing but exacerbate the situation.
Obviously, he doesn't have a good record in this area already. Surely he'll nominate someone with a good criminal justice reform record. What does Joe Biden do?
Nominate this gal as his VP running mate:
What?
WHAT?????
Seriously??
Biden is already terrible in this big issue and chooses a VP that is just as bad as he is? This is a woman who proclaimed herself a 'Top Cop'. She was conspicuously silent on efforts to mandate independent investigations on the use of police force as well as declining to investigate fatal police shootings in California. She targeted parents for violating truancy laws she sponsored as if becoming temporarily orphaned and poorer was good for the child. She took a strong stance on prosecuting marijuana violators, resulting in throwing over one and a half thousand people in jail for the victimless "crime", despite coyly suggesting she has used the drug herself. She appealed the ruling of a judge that may have helped abolish the death penalty in California and is one of the reasons why we still have this draconian form of punishment on the books today in this "progressive" state. Forgive me if her constant retelling of the story about that one case she refused to seek the death penalty rings hollow to me, compared to the massive damage she has done.
She was skewered by Tulsi Gabbard in the presidential primary debates, revealing that she had withheld evidence that was eventually released by a judge and exonerated someone on death row, single-handedly dealing the death blow to Harris's bid for the presidency, trending #KamalaHarrisDestroyed to the stratosphere.
This legal malpractice was not isolated to that instance. She prosecuted George Gage for sexually abusing his stepdaughter, withholding evidence that would have exonerated him, and in a higher court, argued that he did not properly follow procedure in the lower court. Gage, an innocent man, is still in prison due to Harris's argument on a technicality, refusing to withdraw the conviction. Harris also sought a conviction for Daniel Larsen for possession of a firearm, a nonviolent offense, for which Harris sought 28 to life. Thankfully, when she attempted to use the technicality argument again to withhold exculpatory evidence, she lost.
It gets even more bizarre when thinking back to the primary debates where Harris created this huge ruckus about Biden's busing policies in the 1970s as if it were a relevant issue today, just to insinuate Biden is a racist ("I'm not saying you're X, but..." is passive-aggressively calling someone X).
Of course, Biden painted himself into a corner, realizing that being an old white guy, it wasn't going to inspire the woke left to head out to the polling stations (or...mailboxes) and promised a black woman running mate, limited his choices to around three people, while blatantly advertising he was picking an affirmative action candidate. Now the VP has to contend with being the most qualified out of the three, instead of the most qualified out of a whole field of candidates.
The history of these two people speaks for themselves. Yes, they've recently changed positions on some of these issues. Tough on crime was popular when Biden passed his crime bills and is now trying to figure out how to twist into a different position now when it is deeply unpopular. Harris has changed positions on marijuana but unfortunately for California, she helped defeat the marijuana legalization proposition in 2010 which was actually a good proposition and now we have this load of crap marijuana legalization in 2016 which left black markets in place due to its restrictions and high taxes. These changes in sentiment are all moves in a positive direction, but it doesn't erase their history, and certainly doesn't put to ease any questions of their judgment, sense of ethics, or theory of governance. It also doesn't help that they don't even acknowledge their past or any policy shift, making their current position appear insincere.
I normally wouldn't care too much about the VP pick but in Biden's case, his mental state is...well, let's just call it less than desirable. The VP pick here will loom large and may become president within the next four years.
Well, Biden and Harris have likely done more to destroy more nonviolent black and Latino lives than the rest of the Democratic primary presidential field (and possibly including the Republican primary field) combined, through their criminal policies alone. And that was a huge field.
For anyone that cares about police reform or racial inequity, this ticket should be even more toxic than the Trump/Pence already abysmal ticket on the issue. Any protester in the last few months that have taken to the streets, anyone that has displayed the Black Lives Matter posters, any person that has tweeted #DefundPolice, that pulls the lever for Biden/Harris come November will have lost all credibility for their case.
