Kamala's Way Read online

  “We canvassed the entire state of California, one on one, asking people face to face how do they feel about this issue,” Frank Schubert, the “Yes on Prop. 8” strategist, told the Los Angeles Times. “And this is the kind of issue people are very personal and private about, and they don’t like talking to pollsters; they don’t like talking to the media, but we had a pretty good idea how they felt and that’s being reflected in the vote count.”

  Opponents headed to court.

  * * *

  Attorneys general are obligated to defend the laws of the state, regardless of their philosophical views. But there are exceptions.

  Attorney General Jerry Brown, an opponent of Proposition 8, figured out a way to thread the needle, reminiscent of how his father, Pat Brown, and Attorney General Stanley Mosk refused to defend Proposition 14, the 1964 initiative that repealed California’s fair housing law.

  In a 111-page brief filed at the end of 2008, Jerry Brown urged the California Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8. His argument: Marriage is protected as part of the inalienable rights to liberty and privacy, both of which are embedded in California’s constitution. The power to amend the constitution, as happened with Proposition 8, could not be wielded in ways that invalidate an inalienable right.

  For Brown, there was a political advantage to not defending Proposition 8. Brown was planning to give up the attorney general’s office and run for governor in 2010, reclaiming the office he had held as a young man from 1975 to 1983. He was taking a stand that would insulate him against a challenge from the left by Mayor Newsom, who was considering running for governor.

  Brown’s decision had an immediate impact on the court case. With the state abandoning Proposition 8, its defense shifted to the initiative’s supporters. They chose as their advocate Kenneth Starr, then dean of Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, whose yearslong inquisition into President Clinton led to the president’s impeachment over him lying about an affair he had with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

  Starr’s side carried the day, initially. By a 6–1 margin, in another decision by Chief Justice George, the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8 on state constitutional grounds, though the justices also held that the marriages of the same-sex couples who wed during the window when the unions were clearly legal remained valid.

  George left little doubt about how he viewed the issue. In a speech to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 10, 2009, George cited a lesser-known initiative that was overwhelmingly approved on election night 2008, directing farmers to provide fowl and other farm animals with larger cages and pens: “Chickens gained valuable rights in California on the same day that gay men and lesbians lost them.”

  The real fight was taking place in the federal courts, where judges would determine whether the California constitutional amendment created by Proposition 8 violated the U.S. Constitution. Jerry Brown was leaving the attorney general’s office for the governor’s suite. The next attorney general would decide whether to follow Brown’s lead and leave Proposition 8’s defense to its supporters or defend the law.

  That’s where Kamala Harris came in. It would take another two years, but she would prevail, and marriage equality would become a reality in California.

  * * *

  But there were a few detours on the way. As it happens, California’s Proposition 8 did not, in the end, form the basis for the U.S. Supreme Court’s final word on same-sex marriage. That came in 2015, when the justices in a 5–4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges affirmed marriage equality as a constitutional right. The majority opinion author, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, wrote: “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.” But as it often is, California was once again ahead of the rest of the nation.

  Upon taking office in January 2011 as attorney general, Harris, like Brown, refused to defend Proposition 8. More than that, she argued against it, filing a brief on February 27, 2013, with the U.S. Supreme Court urging that the law passed by California voters be struck down.

  “To be clear,” Harris’s brief said, “Proposition 8’s singular purpose was to prevent same-sex couples from marrying, and its only function was to stigmatize the relationships of gay and lesbian families. There is absolutely no legitimate or rational state interest in doing so. Proposition 8 is therefore unconstitutional.”

  With Attorney General Harris unwilling to defend the law, the initiative’s proponents were left to defend it. That case came to be known as Hollingsworth v. Perry, named for Dennis Hollingsworth, a Republican legislator from a conservative part of San Diego and Riverside Counties who was an advocate of traditional marriage.

  The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Hollingsworth’s argument on June 26, 2013, concluding he and the organizations that were challenging Proposition 8 didn’t have standing. They weren’t directly affected by same-sex marriages. Only the state was. Two days after the Supreme Court ruled, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco issued an order opening the way for the marriages to resume in California.

  Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, mothers of four sons between them, were first in line. They had wanted to get married in San Francisco in 2004 when Mayor Newsom ordered that marriage licenses be issued to anyone, no matter their sexual orientation. When courts had put a halt on same-sex marriages, the Berkeley couple sued in the case that came to be known as Hollingsworth v. Perry. Once the Ninth Circuit cleared the way for marriages to resume, Perry and Stier rushed to San Francisco City Hall. A crowd gathered to witness the ceremony. Attorney General Harris tweeted, “On my way to S.F. City Hall. Let the wedding bells ring! #Prop8.”

  On June 28, 2013, on the balcony outside the mayor’s office, Harris performed the marriage ceremony for Perry and Stier. One of Perry’s grown sons was the ring bearer.

  “By virtue of the power and authority vested in me by the State of California, I now declare you spouses for life,” Harris declared. The ceremony lasted four minutes and thirty seconds. It was eons in the making.

  16 The Damned Photos

  At a Safeway shopping center in Tucson, Arizona, Jared Lee Loughner, a schizophrenic twenty-two-year-old man who had been kicked out of community college because of his erratic behavior, pulled out a legally purchased Glock 9mm semiautomatic pistol with a thirty-round magazine, fired it until it ran empty, and reloaded with another thirty-round magazine. When he was finished, six people were dead and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head. That was on January 8, 2011.

  Two days earlier, Kamala Harris had been sworn in as California attorney general. As San Francisco district attorney, Harris was an advocate of getting firearms off the city’s streets. Now, she was looking to set a marker firmly on the side of statewide gun control. The terrible Tucson massacre refocused public attention on gun violence and on people who should be prohibited from possessing firearms. Thankfully, a predecessor had created a law that she could build on.

  Bill Lockyer was the Democratic leader of the state senate when he decided to run for California attorney general in 1998. Lockyer, a gun control advocate, faced a Republican who opposed the California state law that banned assault weapons. Lockyer built his campaign around that contrast. To shove that point home to voters, Lockyer aired an ad that used television news footage of the bloody 1997 shootout in North Hollywood, in which two bank robbers armed with assault weapons battled Los Angeles police for forty-four minutes, injuring eleven officers. Police were so outgunned that some of them went to a gun shop during the bloody showdown so they could borrow seven AR-15–style rifles and two thousand rounds of ammunition.

  At one time, California voters may have opposed gun safety laws. Not any longer. Lockyer’s election proved that a strong stand on gun control was good politics. In the years to come, the legislature would pass many more gu
n safety laws. By any measure, California became one of the toughest—if not the toughest—gun control states in the nation.

  In 2001, Attorney General Lockyer came up with the idea of merging databases: One data set included the names of people who were registered gun owners. The other was of convicted felons, people who had committed domestic violence, and individuals who had been adjudged by courts to be so mentally ill that they needed to be held against their will. Based on their criminal past, abuse of spouses, or psychiatric problems, they were not legally entitled to own firearms. Lockyer’s thought was to create a law that would allow authorities to use the merged database to identify people who could not legally own guns and seize those weapons.

  To author the bill, Lockyer turned to his friend California state senator Jim Brulte, a bear of a man, a brilliant political strategist, and a Southern California Republican. With Brulte as the author, the bill passed without a single no vote. Even the NRA supported it, though it quickly thought better of that position and its representatives have been trying to undermine the bill ever since, without success.

  Lockyer’s legislation created the inelegantly named Armed and Prohibited Persons System (APPS). Its clunky name notwithstanding, it’s one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation ever sponsored by a California attorney general.

  * * *

  When Kamala Harris became attorney general in January 2011, there were an estimated eighteen thousand “armed and prohibited persons” in California who possessed as many as thirty-four thousand guns. The California Department of Justice had detailed eighteen agents to carry out the mission of removing guns from those individuals. She wanted to double the number of agents. The issue was cost.

  California was in the throes of a budget crisis and carried a $27 billion deficit. Governor Jerry Brown and the legislature were looking to cut spending. There would be no money for expanding any program. But Harris had an important ally, Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee chairman Mark Leno. Leno had grown up in Milwaukee, moved to New York as a young man (where he considered becoming a rabbi), and settled in San Francisco in 1981. There, he opened a sign shop and met the love of his life, Douglas Jackson. Leno was by his lover’s side when he died of AIDS in 1990. Leno and Harris had met during Willie Brown’s run for mayor in 1995, and they often would have lunch in the years that followed. In 1996, they got decked out in their finest evening clothes for the San Francisco Symphony’s opening night, and he had the high honor of being a guest at a Harris family Thanksgiving at Shyamala’s home. Mayor Brown appointed Leno to fill a vacant seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. With Brown’s support, Leno ran for and won state assembly and senate seats, serving for fourteen years until he was termed out in 2016.

  In Sacramento, Leno took on hard issues: the annual state budget as budget committee chairman, battling chemical manufacturers to ban toxic flame retardants in furniture, crossing many businesses to push to raise the minimum wage to $15, and requiring police to obtain warrants before searching phones—161 laws in total by the Los Angeles Times’s count. Always civil and gracious, Leno was a liberal who never forgot his core but could find common ground with Republicans. Harris could not have had a better ally in the legislature.

  In 2011, Leno carried legislation to come up with special funding for the program, earmarking money collected by the state when people purchased guns. Harris, testifying on behalf of the legislation, said it would “protect innocent Californians by taking guns out of the hands of those prohibited from owning them.” The gun lobby no longer supported the program, but politics had turned. The gun lobby had little clout in the California capitol. The legislation passed on a party-line vote in the Democratic-controlled legislature.

  * * *

  Harris was able to assign thirty-three agents to the program, not nearly enough. The thirty-three agents could clear twenty-five hundred cases a year. But three thousand new prohibited persons were added to the list each year. The backlog of “armed and prohibited persons” had grown to more than nineteen thousand by the end of 2012.

  Then, on December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, wielding an AR-15–style Remington assault rifle and Glock and Sig Sauer pistols, slaughtered twenty children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In California, legislators reacted by introducing several new measures to combat gun violence. Harris decided to revisit the Armed and Prohibited Persons System.

  I spent a cold January night five weeks after the Sandy Hook slaughter riding with a dozen California Department of Justice agents as they went about what struck me as an extraordinarily difficult and dangerous job: persuading ex-felons, people with a history of severe mental illness, and wife beaters to give up guns that, by law, they are not legally entitled to own.

  Attorney General Harris encouraged the ride-along, hoping that what I wrote as a columnist for the Sacramento Bee would help generate support in the legislature for a proposal she was contemplating to significantly expand the only-in-California law that allowed for those guns to be seized. As for me, I was just looking for something to write.

  At the northeast end of Stockton, a hard-luck part of town, a Justice Department agent wearing a bulletproof vest beneath his black uniform knocked on the door of a small tract home belonging to a man who had suffered his share of tough times in his sixty-five years.

  The man, who lived alone, opened the door a crack. As I wrote at the time, he was the registered owner of eight handguns. Separate records showed that authorities deemed on two occasions that he needed to be held in locked psych wards because he was a danger to himself or others.

  The agent didn’t have a warrant to search the man’s house. His goal was to talk his way in and, with the man’s consent, leave with his guns. The man told the agent he had no guns but agreed that the agent and his partners could come in and see for themselves. A half hour later, they emerged with two revolvers, six bolt-action rifles, and a crate filled with one thousand rounds of ammunition. The guns were kept in closets and under furniture. He seemed clueless that he had them.

  “I’d say he is more of a danger to himself,” John Marsh, the special agent in charge of the unit, told me at the time. “He definitely has his bad days.”

  The agents knocked on ten doors in Stockton on one night and eleven more on a second night in Sacramento and the suburb of Elk Grove. Agents seized twenty-four pistols, rifles, and shotguns. On a final stop in Sacramento, they knocked on the door of a man who had been convicted of assault with a firearm years earlier. After talking their way inside, they found a loaded revolver, a loaded shotgun, and eight other rifles and shotguns, plus ammunition. They took him to Sacramento County jail, where he would be booked on charges of being a felon in possession of guns and ammunition.

  “You have the sense you’re saving lives,” Marsh said at the time. “You’re preventing them from killing themselves or someone else.”

  Harris hoped to double the number of agents, with the goal of clearing the backlog in five to seven years. She was quick to get behind new legislation by Leno. This time, the state would specify that $24 million collected from the fee levied on people who purchased guns would be used to provide additional funding for the program. The bill zipped through the legislature in a mere four months with only a smattering of no votes. The gun lobby objected, but it was all but defanged in California.

  The contrast between what happened after Sandy Hook in Sacramento and what didn’t happen in Washington was stark. With the encouragement of Harris in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, Congressman Mike Thompson, a Democrat from Napa Valley, a Vietnam War veteran, and a hunter, introduced legislation to provide federal funding to states that wanted to establish the Armed and Prohibited Persons System. Harris lobbied for the bill by sending a letter to Vice President Biden seeking the administration’s support. She and an aide testified on its behalf in Congress. But on Capitol Hill, the pro-gun lobby is dominant and so, like all the other measures that were proposed in the w
eeks and months after the Sandy Hook massacre, Thompson’s bill never materialized.

  In California, Harris did not eliminate the backlog of prohibited people who possess firearms, though it wasn’t for lack of effort. There were 18,268 armed and prohibited persons on the list in 2011 when she took office. That number grew to 21,249 in 2014, the year of her reelection, and dipped to 20,483 in 2016, her final year as attorney general.

  When she makes her case for gun control, Harris talks about “the damned photos.” Legislators, or members of Congress who hesitate to vote for gun control bills, should be required to look at “the damned photos” of children who have died by gunfire.

  “Babies. Babies. Babies,” she says in speeches.

  17 Mortgage Meltdown

  In much of the country, the worst of the Great Recession was ending in January 2011 when Kamala Harris took office as attorney general, but not in California. Unemployment in the Central Valley exceeded 16 percent, more than 10 percent of California homeowners were seriously delinquent on their mortgages, and nearly a third of California homeowners owed on their homes more than those homes were worth.

  The ways in which Harris confronted that crisis and the human toll it took in her first thirteen months in office defined much of her tenure as attorney general, formed the foundation of her public image as a leader, and shaped her future.

  “As Attorney General of California, I took on the five biggest Wall Street banks during the financial crisis. We won $20 billion for California homeowners and together we passed the strongest anti-foreclosure law in the United States of America,” Harris posted on her Facebook and Twitter accounts. It is her calling card. The statement is true. As is her way, it is also complicated.