The California Senator is known as a tough, scrappy fighter, who clawed – and slept – her way to the top.
She also has a long track record of locking up black Americans for minor offenses and laughing about it.
But it’s her family tree that has many experts predicting Joe Biden will be weighed down with a lot of baggage.
There’s no doubt Willie Brown’s favorite Senator is on the rise.
But before Democrats celebrate too much over Biden’s pick, there are some serious concerns sure to come out about his VP pick.
Most seem to have forgotten how her presidential campaign was rocked with scandal after scandal almost from the day she announced.
First was her already well-known and well-documented affair with former San Francisco Mayor and California powerbroker, Willie Brown.
But then the former California speaker and Oakland Mayor made it worse as he proudly recalled how he helped Kamala Harris, then an assistant prosecutor, launch her political career in exchange for, well, certain favors.
Harris’s first meaningful political role was an appointment by her powerful then-boyfriend Brown, to a California medical board that was widely criticized as being nothing more than a place for patronage jobs and kickbacks.
Brown placed her on the California Medical Assistance Commission in 1994 – a position that paid over $70,000 per year, more than $120,000 in current money.
But the money wasn’t the point. This position was seen as a plumb assignment, especially for someone so young – Harris was
30 years younger than anyone else on the board and had no known experience in the medical industry.
Brown also helped Harris in her first campaign for District Attorney where yet another scandal arose as Harris and her campaign was found guilty of violating campaign finance regulations and overspending by more than $100,000.
During her time as District Attorney, Harris tried to position herself as a tough prosecutor, often saying, “It’s not progressive to be soft on crime”.
And yet as District Attorney she ultimately overturned more than 1,000 convictions due to problems in the city’s forensic lab. So while she was accused of now being soft on crime, she also faced serious charges of mismanagement and corruption during her tenure.
One political rival said her office had “systematically violated defendants’ civil and constitutional rights” because her office hid “damaging information about a police drug lab technician and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings.”
In the midst of these charges, Harris was launching her ultimately successful campaign for California Attorney General. That would be followed by her election to the U.S. Senate.
Most of those things are already well-known and will assuredly be major campaign issues used against her.
But less known is the scandal that rocked her during her abortive presidential run.
Harris is a vocal supporter of taxpayer funding for reparations to the descendants of slaves.
That’s a major problem for Harris – and now Biden.
Many political pundits wonder if Kamala Harris would receive reparations… or pay them.
As it turns out, Harris is descended from slave owner Hamilton Brown, the namesake of Brown’s Town in Jamaica.
That’s right. Harris is not descended from slaves but from slave owners.
Her own father, Donald Harris, laid it all out in an essay he wrote for Jamaica Global Online entitled “Reflections of a Jamaican Father,” in which he made the startling admission.
But Hamilton Brown was not only a slave owner, he was known as a particularly brutal slave owner, as reported here earlier this year. There are numerous documented reports of Brown beating, abusing, and even killing his slaves.
Though this information has been available for years, it became an issue only when Harris started rising in the polls during her presidential run and started demanding slave reparations.
And just recently, new information came out actually detailing the number of slaves Harris’s descendants owned as well as the names of most of them.
It turns out Harris’s family owned as many as 338 slaves for the plantations for which the records survived. There were at least six plantations owned by Brown where there are no records.
Kamala Harris refuses to discuss the issue and when challenged on it, resorts to crying racism.
That is a tactic that may not work in her new campaign.