If all goes well, Vice President Kamala Harris will be sworn in as President on January 20, 2025. If that happens, she will bring her experience as a local district attorney and California’s attorney general to the Oval Office.
That will be a very good thing.
Others are now arguing that those experiences will be important in her campaign, but I want to argue that they also will help make her a good president.
Harris has already signaled that she will make her prosecutorial work a central theme in her campaign and use it to offer voters a choice between “a cop and a con man.” On Monday, in an appearance at her new campaign headquarters, she previewed what we will likely hear over the next few months.
Harris wasted little time in touting her prosecutorial experience. She reminded the audience of staff and volunteers, “Before I was elected as Vice President, before I was elected as a United States senator, I was the elected attorney general of California. And before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor.”
In those roles, she explained, “I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”
To drive home the point, Harris cited the civil court judgment that Trump committed sexual assault, his allegedly fraudulent for-profit university, and criminal conviction this spring for falsifying business records.
Whether such an attack will play well with voters remains to be seen. But the qualities that make for a successful prosecutor will stand Harris in good stead in the White House.
And, at a time when many Americans have become convinced that prosecution has been turned into a political weapon, her experience making prosecutorial decisions will help steer this country on the right path as we seek to restore confidence in the justice system.
Before considering why her experience as a district attorney and an attorney general will help make Kamala Harris a good president, let’s recall the way prosecutorial experience plays out in politics.
First, it is important to note that being a district attorney or a state attorney general has long been a good place from which to launch a political career. Both of those offices deal with a wide range of both legal and policy issues of the kind that chief executives at the state and federal levels also must confront.
Like Harris, district attorneys frequently run for and become attorneys general in their states. As an article in the New Yorker notes, “The exemplar of the transformation of prosecution into a high-profile opportunity was Earl Warren, who, like Harris, went from being a local prosecutor, in Oakland, to being California’s attorney general.”
Warren would later serve as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Today, attorneys general in several states started their careers as local prosecutors. Among them is Dave Yost, the attorney general of Ohio, who previously served as the prosecuting attorney for Delaware County. Others include Raúl Torrez, the attorney general of New Mexico, who was the district attorney for that state’s Second Judicial District, and Brenna Bird, the attorney general of Iowa. Bird was the Guthrie County Attorney, which is equivalent to a district attorney role.
And many attorneys general have gone on to serve as governors of their states. Examples among current governors include Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Jeff Landry of Louisiana, Janet Mills of Maine, Maura Healey of Massachusetts, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.
But being a district attorney or a state attorney general has seldom been part of the pathway to the White House. In fact, Grover Cleveland is the only president to have had experience in a district attorney’s office. He was assistant district attorney of Erie County, New York, from 1869 to 1870.
Only one president, Martin Van Buren, served as attorney general at the state level before entering the White House. Van Buren served as New York’s attorney general from 1815 to 1819 and became president in 1837.
Neither Cleveland nor Van Buren would make anyone’s list of distinguished American presidents. But times have changed, and the roles and responsibilities of district attorneys and attorneys general are much different today from when those presidents held those positions.
Kamala Harris served as the 27th District Attorney of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011. She was the first woman and the first Black and South Asian American woman to hold that office.
As the San Franciso Chronicle notes, “During her first campaign for district attorney…she adopted the catchphrase ‘We don’t just need to be tough on crime, we need to be smart on crime.’” By San Francisco standards, the Chronicle says, ‘Kamala was a moderate.’”
As the Chronicle reports, “During her time as San Francisco district attorney, violent crime in the city stayed roughly flat while property crime decreased. In 2003, the year before she took office, the city reported 5,764 violent crimes. In 2010, her final year as district attorney, the city reported 5,808 violent crimes…. Property crime decreased from 39,384 reported crimes in 2003 to 33,200 in 2010.”
Among Harris’s most controversial actions an anti-truancy program she launched in 2008. Her office threatened to prosecute people whose children chronically missed school and supported a California law that made it possible to jail such parents for up to a year.
She also got into hot water when she refused to seek the death penalty for a gang member who shot a San Francisco police officer. That decision alienated police and law enforcement officials in the city and throughout the state.
But it showed her courage and resolve.
Among the things she did as California Attorney General, Harris took on for-profit colleges that she accused of saddling students with unsustainable debt and regularly sued fossil fuel companies.
An article in Vox says that “A close examination of Harris’s record shows it’s filled with contradictions.” As Vox explains, “She pushed for programs that help people find jobs instead of putting them in prison, but also fought to keep people in prison after they were proved innocent.”
Harris “refused to pursue the death penalty against the man who killed the police officer but also defended California’s death penalty system in court. She implemented training programs to address police officers’ racial bias, but also resisted calls to get her office to investigate certain police shootings.”
I think Vox gets it right when it concludes that “what seemed like contradictions may reflect a balancing act.” Harris’s record as district attorney and attorney general suggests that she is a pragmatist rather than an ideologue.
That disposition will help her in the Oval Office.
In addition, because district attorneys and attorneys general have enormous power and discretion in deciding whom to prosecute and for what, they must learn to exercise their power in a judicious fashion. As the United States Attorney General Robert Jackson put it more than eighty years ago, “The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous.
“The citizen’s safety,” Jackson argued, “lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.”
Harris has shown that she has the qualities that Jackson praised, qualities which would be sorely lacking if Donald Trump is elected for a second term.