Kamala Harris defied court rulings as California's Attorney General. Imagine what she might do as President.

 

I think the prospect of Kamala Harris as President of the United States is one of profound danger for the rule of law in this country.  When she was Attorney General of California, she disobeyed and displayed open contempt for court rulings - including the Supreme Court - ordering the State to fix its prison problems.  If she was that recalcitrant and obstructionist back then, what would she be like when wielding Presidential authority?

Kamala Harris ... repeatedly and openly defied U.S. Supreme Court orders to reduce overcrowding in California prisons while serving as the state’s attorney general, according to legal documents reviewed by the Prospect. Working in tandem with Gov. Jerry Brown, Harris and her legal team filed motions that were condemned by judges and legal experts as obstructionist, bad-faith, and nonsensical, at one point even suggesting that the Supreme Court lacked the jurisdiction to order a reduction in California’s prison population.

The intransigence of this legal work resulted in the presiding judges in the case giving serious consideration to holding the state in contempt of court. Observers worried that the behavior of Harris’s office had undermined the very ability of federal judges to enforce their legal orders at the state level, pushing the federal court system to the brink of a constitutional crisis. This extreme resistance to a Supreme Court ruling was done to prevent the release of fewer than 5,000 nonviolent offenders, whom multiple courts had cleared as presenting next to no risk of recidivism or threat to public safety.

Despite a straightforward directive from the Supreme Court to identify prisoners for release over a two-year period, upholding a 2009 ruling that mandated the same action over the same timeline, the state spent the majority of that period seesawing back and forth between dubious legal filings and flagrant disregard. By early 2013, it became clear that the state had no intention to comply, leading to a series of surprisingly combative exchanges.

. . .

Harris’s office launched into a campaign of all-out obstruction, refusing to answer why they could not simply release low-risk, nonviolent inmates to conform to the Supreme Court’s request. “Defendants offered no explanation, however, why they could not release low-risk prisoners early,” the June 2013 ruling stated.

But Harris’s office didn’t stop there. Instead, they claimed on behalf of the state that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to even request such a release, refusing to answer questions as to how they would implement the Supreme Court ruling, and courting a constitutional crisis. That resulted in a stunningly sharp rebuke from the three-judge district court panel in a June 2013 ruling.

When asked by what date the state could identify their list of prisoners who are unlikely to reoffend, “defendants defiantly refused,” the judges wrote, “and stated, somewhat astonishingly, that our suggestion that we might order defendants to develop a system to identify low-risk prisoners, a system that the Supreme Court had suggested we might consider ordering defendants to develop ‘without delay,’ is a prisoner release order that vastly exceeds the scope of any of the Court’s prior orders.” The Supreme Court, in fact, ruled that the three-judge district court panel had exactly that authority in its 2011 ruling. “In tortured logic,” the district court continued, “defendants suggested that the Supreme Court’s statement ‘did not authorize the early release of prisoners,’ or even the consideration of that question.”

Harris’s attorney general’s office, the ruling added, “continually equivocated regarding the facts and the law,” to the point that the panel strongly considered holding the state in contempt.

There's much more at the link, including links to other articles providing more details.  A tip o' the hat to Francis Turner for drawing my attention to the source.

I don't think anyone in his/her right mind could actually want someone who's displayed such contempt for the rule of law to be elected to a position where she could defy the law, ignoring Supreme Court decisions, enacting her own will through executive orders, and daring opponents to take her to court to overturn her rulings.  With the power of the Presidency behind her, she could throw the entire legal and judicial system in the United States into disarray.

(This, of course, has nothing to do with her political affiliation.  I daresay there are some Republican - and other Democrat - politicians who would be just as dangerous to our legal system if they ended up in the White House.)

Peter