The thing about “progressivism” is that while it flaps its jaws about “helping” the vulnerable, it inevitably ends up harming them.
Give them a $15 minimum wage and mandatory sick time? Get them laid off!
Attack landlords for the “quality” of housing they provide? Make housing unaffordable!
Kamala Harris, in her celebrated (by the media) record as a prosecutor, did more than her fair share of being unfair.
. Her crusade against the scourge of parents whose kids skip school, for example:
The good news is that post-CNN town hall, although much of the media lauded Harris and posted adoring articles about her acumen and likability, several took it upon themselves to resurface videos of Harris’s recent support for cracking down on truancy violations.
In 2010, for example, video shows Harris saying, “I believe a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime. So I decided I was gonna start prosecuting parents for truancy.”
“Well, this was a little controversial in San Francisco,” Harris noted, with a folksy giggle.
Another video showed Harris bragging about her power: “As a prosecutor in law enforcement, I have huge stick. The school district as a carrot. Let’s work together in tandem…to get those kids in school.”
Have I ever mentioned how much I love prosecutors who are drunk with their own power?
Her policies involved $2,000 fines, and even jail time, for parents whose kids missed “too much” school.
Which, people who actually pay attention to this issue will tell you, is a stupid, stupid plan, unless your goal is to paint yourself as “tough”:
…the people hurt by this carceral approach are the very people who are most likely to be financially crippled by a few fines. We’re not talking about wealthy people here, and generally speaking, criminal justice reform advocates fear using punitive means to “help” poor people because it can be so easy for them to get trapped in a cycle of unpaid fines that leads to jail time, which leads to time forcibly taken off of work, which leads to even less money and even less ability to pay outstanding debts.
None of this, you can imagine, helps children get a more stable home life with more attention from parents.
With junior high and high school kids, truancy often isn’t something parents can control (while still holding down jobs, anyway).
With younger kids? If they’re missing school regularly, it’s usually not a matter of “truancy”; it’s problems at home, more often than not problems stemming from one personal or social pathology or another.
In what other area of society do we try to address this sort of thing with fines and jail time?
Kamala Harris is a public cancer.
