Colin Allred keeps Kamala Harris at arms length as he makes a play for the center
Colin Allred keeps Kamala Harris at arms length as he makes a play for the center
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who is facing off against Allred in his reelection campaign, has worked to tie Allred to Harris’ political record.
"On a recent appearance on MSNBC, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred was asked how Vice President Kamala Harris’ presumptive rise to the top of the party’s ticket was affecting his campaign in Texas to unseat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
Allred’s response was polite, but muted: “Vice President Harris was a member of the congressional Black Caucus and I’ve known her for some time and I support her nomination.”
That five-second comment was all the time Allred spent discussing Harris. He quickly pivoted for the rest of the seven-minute segment to attacking Cruz for blocking bipartisan border security and immigration bills, opposing abortion access and leaving the state for Cancun when millions of Texans had lost power in their homes in 2021.
Harris’s impending nomination has injected the November election with renewed enthusiasm among Democrats, who are hoping the historic nature of her candidacy as a woman of color could also boost down-ballot candidates. But in Republican-dominated Texas, Allred — who has been running his campaign as a centrist — is not flocking to her side."
Long history of Texas Democrats trying to run to the center and then crashing and burning. The center is were Democrats go to die in Texas.
@njm1314 it happens so often you'd think he knows better
I’m not sure I agree with this take. We need baby steps down here to chip away at the redness.
Republicans have ruled the state for almost 40 years. The baby steps ain't got them anywhere. The problem in Texas is Texas Democrats never Inspire turnout. The votes are there they just leave them where they are. Texas Democrats would rather pursue conservatives than win elections with leftists. Hell not even leftist just liberals.
My feeling is Allred here is going to do it again. He'll do better than most will because everyone hates Ted Cruz, but he'll still leave votes on the table like they always do. If I had to sum up the Texas democratic party and one phrase I'd say low energy. His campaign is looking like it's moving in that direction too.
The center you're talking about in America is far right.
Stop saying center...lol. It makes you look foolish.
Obama was right of Reagan, people. Just let it sink in.
Texas is a purple state, but there aren’t many votes to get in the middle. It’s a turnout game, and in a presidential year, it’s going to be hard.
We have seen this before. Running center right in red states is exactly how you lose my 15 to 20 points.
You need to offer people in red states radical new ideas.
You are likely going to lose, why not go out swinging big.
Who can blame him? Harris locked up over 1500 for pot and then laughed about it when asked if she ever smoked herself, blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts literally forced her to release it, kept people locked up beyond their sentences to use them as labor slaves for the state, and on and on. She's a cop of the worst kind, draconian, ruthless, and power hungry. You think Allred really wants to associate himself with this kind of conduct? Meanwhile the media is screaming "You go girl!!" just because she's running against Trump. Her past has been conveniently memory-holed.
"Who can blame him? Harris locked up over 1500 for pot and then laughed about it when asked if she ever smoked herself,"
As attorney general, Kamala Harris would not have personally prosecuted drug cases. Local district attorneys would generally prosecute such cases so to say Harris "put ... people in jail" as state attorney general is not accurate.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/analysis-tulsi-gabbard-kamala-harris/
But the attorney general’s office doesn’t directly prosecute the vast majority of drug cases in the state. That’s up to the individual district attorneys in each county, and it’s wrong to say Harris put those people in jail.
Still, Harris did directly prosecute marijuana cases as San Francisco district attorney from 2004 through 2010. The DA’s office has not yet released data about pot convictions during that time period.
"blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts literally forced her to release it,"
Did she hold the evidence herself or was it held in evidence and was previously tested already?
My understanding is that they withheld evidence and fought a court order to turn it over. It wasn't an accident.
Here are some sources that Harris is an authoritarian cop
Kamala Harris Fought to Keep Nonviolent Prisoners Locked Up
https://prospect.org/justice/how-kamala-harris-fought-to-keep-nonviolent-prisoners-locked-up/
As California attorney general, she spent years subverting a 2011 Supreme Court ruling requiring the state to reduce its prison population. The overseeing judicial panel nearly found the state in contempt of court.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), a leading candidate to be Joe Biden’s running mate, 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.
Kamala Harris fought to uphold bad convictions and cover for dirty cops
With the growing recognition that prosecutors hold the keys to a fairer criminal justice system, the term “progressive prosecutor” has almost become trendy. This is how Senator Kamala Harris of California, a likely presidential candidate and a former prosecutor, describes herself. But she’s not.
Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.
Consider her record as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011. Ms. Harris was criticized in 2010 for withholding information about a police laboratory technician who had been accused of “intentionally sabotaging” her work and stealing drugs from the lab. After a memo surfaced showing that Ms. Harris’s deputies knew about the technician’s wrongdoing and recent conviction, but failed to alert defense lawyers, a judge condemned Ms. Harris’s indifference to the systemic violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights.
Ms. Harris contested the ruling by arguing that the judge, whose husband was a defense attorney and had spoken publicly about the importance of disclosing evidence, had a conflict of interest. Ms. Harris lost. More than 600 cases handled by the corrupt technician were dismissed.
Kamala Harris fought to keep innocent people in prison
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2012-aug-21-la-me-innocent-20120821-story.html
Daniel Larsen was in a California prison serving a life sentence when he received the news he had awaited more than a decade. A federal court in Los Angeles had thrown out his conviction for carrying a concealed knife.
Two judges concluded that jurors who convicted Larsen would never have found him guilty had they heard from additional witnesses who saw a different man with the knife. Larsen’s attorney, who has since been disbarred, failed to adequately investigate the case and identify the witnesses before the trial, the judges found.
But two years after he was supposed to be released, Larsen remains behind bars while the California attorney general appeals the decision. The state’s main argument: He did not file his legal paperwork seeking release on time.
California Atty. Gen.Kamala D. Harris, whose office maintains that evidence still points to Larsen’s guilt, accuses him and his attorneys of filing a petition seeking his release more than six years after he was legally required to do so. Prosecutors question whether the judges had the authority to hear Larsen’s petition for release.
The standoff offers a window into what is often a defendant’s last chance to have a criminal conviction overturned.
Larsen turned to the federal court to file a habeas corpus claim after exhausting his appeals in California state courts. In overturning Larsen’s conviction, the federal court found he was “actually innocent” under the law because it had no confidence in the outcome of the original trial.
After 13 Years in Prison, Man Found Innocent of Crime Freed
Kamala Harris opposed measures to legalize marijuana/Prop 19
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-pot-referendum-a-political-land-mine-for-democrats/
Both Cooley and his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris, San Francisco's district attorney, are opposed to Prop. 19, and both refused to give a straight answer in a debate earlier this month as to whether they would defend the initiative in court should it pass. Cooley, however, "strongly suggested he wouldn't be carrying the banner for Proposition 19 as a defender of voter-approved recreational weed," the Sacramento Bee reported.
Kamala Harris supported reporting juvenile undocumented immigrants to ICE
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/11/politics/kfile-kamala-harris-undocumented-juveniles/index.html
As district attorney of San Francisco, Kamala Harris supported a city policy that required law enforcement to turn over undocumented juvenile immigrants to federal immigration authorities if they were arrested and suspected of committing a felony, regardless of whether they were actually convicted of a crime.
Harris, who was San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011, sided with then-Mayor Gavin Newsom in a political fight over San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city that split the city’s municipal government, with the mayor’s office supporting the policy and the city’s elected Board of Supervisors opposing it.
Harris’ past position could open her up to attacks from immigration activists as well as the more progressive wing of the party as she seeks the Democratic nomination in 2020. The fight over the San Francisco policy was covered extensively at the time, but Harris’ role has not been closely examined since she entered the national spotlight. KFile explored her position during a review of her record on immigration.
Regarding sex work: Kamala Harris ramped up stings in immigrant communities, opposed measures to legalize sex work (or simply to stop sex worker arrests), spread misinformation about human trafficking, ignored sexual misconduct by police, and aggressively targeted websites where sex workers advertised.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/kamala-harris-sex-workers-rights-799021/ https://archive.is/lzozu
Sex workers and their advocates are likely to be skeptical of Harris’ position, given her history. In 2008, when Proposition K, which would have decriminalized prostitution, was put to voters in San Francisco, District Attorney Harris was unequivocally opposed to the measure. “I think it’s completely ridiculous, just in case there’s any ambiguity about my position,” Harris told the New York Times at the time. “It would put a welcome mat out for pimps and prostitutes to come on into San Francisco.”
More recently, in 2017, Harris supported SESTA/FOSTA, a bill that was intended to curb online sex-trafficking, but which took no steps to differentiate trafficking from commercial sex work. Sex workers say that, by threatening to punish third-party sites where sex ads were posted, the law has mostly succeeded at pushing them offline and onto the streets, making their lives more dangerous in the process. Asked directly about her vote on SESTA, Harris spoke specifically about Backpage.com, a website that hosted classified ads before it was shut down by the federal government in 2018.
I could go on, but honestly it's useless to argue politics online. My main point being that Kamala Harris is being painted as this beacon of progressivism by the media when her record says otherwise so it's understandable why Allred, a true proponent of justice reform, would want to keep his distance. Yes, I understand, Trump sucks. I'm not advocating that people vote for him either.