• KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    This undersells Kamala’s “legal issues”. She was Attorney General for 6 years:

    Harris’ office took on predatory for-profit colleges and also secured a nearly $20 billion settlement with banks following the 2008 foreclosure crisis.

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-kamala-harris-legal-career-and-political-record

    The biggest argument against Harris is that she put too many people behind bars. She was too good at her job. I think people will care less about it since Biden directed the FDA to reschedule weed as schedule 3.

    • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      She was too good at her job. I think people will care less about it since Biden directed the FDA to reschedule weed as schedule 3.

      First test of whether she’s actually moved on from her boomer-views of weed will be whether she undoes that.

      As I feel the need to say every time I bring this up, I will be voting Kamala Harris in November. I don’t see that these criticisms from when she was a VP candidate are any less valid than they were then though.

      https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/kamala-cop-record/596758/

      Closing paragraphs of that article:

      I can forgive a politician a vote on a crime bill that looks ill-conceived two decades later, or a too-slow evolution toward marijuana legalization, or even a principled belief in the death penalty, something I adamantly oppose. I find it far harder to forgive fighting to keep a man in jail in the face of strong evidence of innocence, running a team of prosecutors that withholds potentially exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys, and utterly failing as the state’s top prosecutor to rein in glaringly corrupt district attorneys and law enforcement.

      At best, Harris displayed a pattern of striking ignorance about scandalous misconduct in hierarchies that she oversaw. And she is now asking the public to place her atop a bigger, more complicated, more powerful hierarchy, where abuses and unaccountable officials would do even more to subvert liberty and justice for all.

    • ashok36@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Harris is also the one that has been more public about legalizing weed. She was the one that promised it in 2020 and reiterated the promise a few months ago. With six months left, I’m skeptical but it’s still in the realm of possibility.

      If the Republicans were smart, they’d do it first. Ballot initiatives for Marijuana legalization has driven blue turnout in several states lately. Florida has an initiative on the ballot this year along with abortion. I think FL will be a lot more competitive than people think with the ballot initiatives driving turnout for young people.

    • aard@kyu.de
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      5 months ago

      Just read her wikipedia page - as I’m not from the US I’ve been mostly treating US politics as a bad comedy show for the last two decades or so, and even though she’s vice president she was too much of a side character to register.

      The one thing that did rech me over there was that she’s a bad candidate as VP as she’ll erect a police state when biden dies. After reading her bio I can’t find problems there, though. I disagree with some details - like seeking life imprisonment - but can give her a pass due to the environment she’s operating in which probably wouldn’t allow anything else (if you’re confused: all convicts should undergo rehabilitation attempts with goal of release. If you stay locked up it’ll be due to you still posing a danger to society, in which case you still get more privileges than a prisoner as at that stage it is considered a mental health issue, and treating you as prisoner for that would be a human rights violation).

      For sticking to not seeking death penalty she deserves respect, though, and generally she seemed to be focused on putting actual criminals to prison.