Kamala's Way

by Dan Morain

  That story line was especially popular with reporters who had flocked to Washington to cover the Trump drama for the folks back home. What perpetrators of that narrative often overlooked was that Harris was by no means the only Democrat battling Trump and scoring victories. Many other Democratic lawmakers were also expertly pinning down administration officials on a variety of issues and provoking Trump enough for him to single them out.

  One was Congressman Adam Schiff, the Democrat from the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank who considered running for the Senate seat Harris won and now was leading the House version of the Trump-Russia investigation. Another was a first-term congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

  The Senate was full of Trump resisters, too, including at least two former prosecutors who hadn’t called nearly as much attention to their backgrounds as Harris did. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse oversaw scores of prosecutors as the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut had been the state’s attorney general for more years than Harris served as California’s attorney general. All six of the other Democrats on the Intel Committee were skilled at getting answers from even the most hostile of witnesses. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Senator Mark Warner, was particularly good at it.

  Some of the old guard, like Feinstein, were renowned for being thoroughly prepared, asking informed questions, and getting the answers they needed. But where Harris would rely on direct confrontation, Feinstein acted more on instinct.

  Feinstein elicited perhaps the biggest money quote of the Trump-Russia hearings during her questioning of former FBI director James Comey. Comey’s appearance, a day after Rosenstein’s, came amid media reports that Trump had invited him to the White House for a private dinner for two, demanded loyalty from him, and then, when Comey refused, fired him without cause. The fact that Comey had taken detailed contemporaneous—and court-admissible—notes of everything made his appearance especially significant.

  So did the fact that Trump, in response to those reports, hinted in a tweet that maybe there were secret White House tapes that would prove Comey wrong.

  Comey spent hours testifying, often giving long and sometimes rambling answers to friendly questions from committee Democrats, including Harris. In the middle of his response to a question from Feinstein, he said, “Look, I’ve seen the tweet about tapes. Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” before returning to the subject at hand. A video clip of that exchange was posted to the internet and viewed by millions before the day was out.

  * * *

  In normal times, Harris’s brash confidence and unapologetic ambition would have generated more friction within the ultracompetitive Senate. But the timing of her arrival proved fortuitous. From the start of the 115th Congress, Senate Democrats quickly realized that they faced a far greater threat from the Trump administration than they did from one another. Most pulled together in response.

  Many of the staffers who make the Senate run found Harris to be far more approachable than most of her colleagues. That, in turn, paid off handsomely for her.

  “In my interactions with her, I’ve found her to be extremely personable and funny when it comes to dealing with staff,” said one senior staffer to a Democratic senator on the Intel Committee. “Many senators have somewhat of an imperious attitude when it comes to staffers, but that definitely isn’t the case with Senator Harris.”

  Wyden and Harris formed a special bond. The two were often seen walking and talking in the Senate hallways together, the six-foot-four Wyden towering over Harris, who is five foot two. Wyden, who went to college on a basketball scholarship, and Harris spent a lot of their work downtime talking about her Golden State Warriors and his Portland Trailblazers.

  “Kamala Harris comes to play every day. I mean, every single day. She’s prepared, she’s focused, she’s smart, she’s effective. She does her homework,” Wyden said. “And that’s really the coin of the realm of the Senate: who’s doing their homework and who’s just throwing press releases out for a ten-second sizzle and is not really serious about that.”

  For years, Wyden doggedly pursued lines of questioning that raised awareness about a raft of significant issues and concerns. He had, for example, railed for more than sixteen years about government overreach on surveillance, torture, drone strikes, and other U.S. intelligence and judicial matters in prosecuting the war on terrorism. But he often found himself voted down by a 13–2 or even a 14–1 margin. With Harris on the committee, he found an ally. She voted with him on many of the most significant issues before the committee, after doing her own research.

  Although Harris’s vote was not enough usually to tip the balance in most cases, her support made a big difference in helping Wyden promote an amendment that would have prohibited the use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect Americans’ internet search history and web browsing records. They lost by one vote. In January 2017, after Wyden was reelected to his fourth term, he took his daughter Scarlett to his ceremonial swearing-in in the Old Senate Chamber. The redheaded four-year-old drew laughs by giving Biden, who was swearing in senators, an unusual but skeptical look.

  “I actually showed it to a few people on the floor because they had asked me about it,” Wyden said. “And so there was a group of us and everybody said, ‘What’s she doing in it?’ And Kamala piped up and said, ‘Scarlett’s giving the vice president of the United States side-eye, everybody! That’s what’s going on!’ ”

  Thinking about the episode later, Wyden concluded that Harris truly did bring to the Senate something new. She shares recipes. She wears Chuck Taylors. She invites senators over for small dinners. She has an interesting family. She loves basketball.

  “She is somebody who is just a very interesting person to be around.”

  30 Harris v. Kavanaugh

  On October 9, 2017, Senator Dianne Feinstein announced via Twitter that she would run in 2018 for another term, although she hadn’t exactly figured out the newfangled world of Twitter. She had, at last count, 7,557 Twitter followers. Kamala Harris, adept at the no-longer-new modes of communication, had 6.9 million. This would come in handy.

  In California and Washington, many Democrats had hoped that Feinstein would step aside after a storied Senate career that began in 1992. At the end of another six-year term, she would be ninety-one. But Feinstein believed she had plenty left to give. As the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, she was deeply involved in the confirmation and, occasionally, rejection of President Trump’s nominees to lifetime appointments to the federal bench. Within minutes of Feinstein’s announcement, Harris sent a fund-raising letter to her own supporters asking for contributions to Feinstein’s reelection campaign.

  “Since joining the Senate in January, I have found few better allies in our fight to stop the radical agenda of Donald Trump than Dianne,” Harris wrote. “She’s joined with us in every major fight.”

  But that alliance was about to be tested.

  * * *

  Kamala Harris could not block the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in September 2018, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. Through that hearing, Harris showed a wider public that she was unafraid to confront powerful men, that she was a warrior, and that she understood the need to comfort women who had been harmed.

  Democrats knew the math. With Republicans holding fifty-one of the one hundred seats, Senate leader Mitch McConnell had the votes to confirm Kavanaugh. Democrats could, however, mess with the process. Harris helped with that.

  As the confirmation hearings opened on Tuesday, September 4, 2018, Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was eighty-four, the second-oldest member of the Senate, a year younger than Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the committee. When Grassley gaveled the hearings open, Democrats, starting with Harris, interrupted him. It was, of course, orchestrated.

  “We cannot possibly move forward, Mr. Chairman, with this hearing,” Harris said, seconds into Grassley’s open
ing. Harris, like the other Democrats, pointed out that Democrats were given forty-two thousand pages pertaining to Kavanaugh’s background just fifteen hours before and had not had an opportunity to review them.

  While protesters demonstrated outside, some of them wearing the crimson Handmaid’s Tale costumes, Democrat Cory Booker of New Jersey boomed, “Mr. Chairman, what is the rush? What are we trying to hide by not having the documents out front?”

  Grassley, in his folksy tone, repeatedly declared the postponement requests as being out of order, and the hearing proceeded. Senators, legal experts, and character witnesses spent nearly seven hours giving interminable opening statements and offering their opinions, good and bad, of Kavanaugh.

  In the coming days, Democrats sought to elicit information from Kavanaugh, and he avoided giving them answers. Harris was in the thick of it, though in proceedings marked by outbursts and acrimony, she was actually one of the tamer combatants, most likely because she was still very much the junior member of the committee, which included Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, each of them planning presidential campaigns. Pundits couldn’t resist making cracks about how the trio was regarding the hearing as a launchpad for higher office. Republican senators seemed less amused by that prospect, accusing Democrats of unfairly piling on Kavanaugh to score points with their party and voters, as if Republicans wouldn’t do the same if circumstances were reversed.

  Harris’s turn to face Kavanaugh came late on the first full day when senators had an opportunity to question the nominee. Her questioning proved confusing. “Judge, have you ever discussed Special Counsel Mueller or his [Trump-Russia] investigation with anyone?”

  Sure, he answered. He had discussed the Mueller investigation with other judges. Harris then asked if he’d ever discussed it with anyone from the law firm of Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz. Either Kavanaugh didn’t remember or he did a good job of pretending that was the case. As he fumbled with vague and noncommittal responses, Harris kept at it. In a moment of drama, she added, “Be sure about your answer, sir.”

  Republican senators cut in. Senator Mike Lee of Utah interrupted Harris’s questioning to say law firms have so many lawyers, and change them so frequently, that Kavanaugh shouldn’t be expected to remember.

  “They’re constantly metastasizing,” Lee said. “They break off; they form new firms. They’re like rabbits. They spawn new firms. There is no possible way we can expect this witness to know who populates an entire firm.”

  After a brief skirmish by other senators over who can interrupt the proceedings and when, Harris returned to the same point: Had Kavanaugh talked to anyone at Trump’s personal attorney’s law firm?

  “I think you can answer the question without me giving you a list of all employees of that law firm,” she told him.

  Ultimately, Harris concluded that Kavanaugh hadn’t denied speaking to anyone at the firm and moved on. The exchange became one of the most talked about of the entire hearing. But it was, at best, inconclusive. Kasowitz and others claimed such a conversation had never happened. Harris was lampooned in the media and by conservatives about trying to be too dramatic, only to have her attempt fall flat. While her aides said she had specific information, that information never became public. She seemed to have asked a question not knowing the answer, something a practiced prosecutor would not do. But if that line of questioning flopped, she found a way to recover.

  * * *

  Harris had found a 1999 op-ed that Kavanaugh wrote for the Wall Street Journal about an obscure court case in which he twice used the term “racial spoils system.” What did that term mean? she asked Kavanaugh. He dodged, and she repeated the question, and he dodged again. That happened four more times, and Harris finally gave up, but not before lecturing the federal judge.

  “You should know that the same year you wrote your op-ed, a magazine published a cover story—a magazine that is described as being a white supremacist magazine—published a cover story about what are called, quote, the racial spoils system, of, quote, affirmative action, the double standard in crime, sensitivity toward Black deficiencies, and everything else.” Harris also cited the writings of a “self-proclaimed Euro-centrist” who referred to “racial spoils.”

  She pointed out that a Supreme Court justice ought to be aware that certain terms “are loaded and associated with a certain perspective and, sometimes, a certain political agenda.”

  “Well, I take your point,” Kavanaugh replied. “And I appreciate it.”

  Harris then turned to cases with outsized implications in which the Supreme Court held that states could not prohibit married or unmarried people from using contraceptives. She asked Kavanaugh six different ways if he believed they were correctly decided. He dodged those questions, too, until Harris cornered him by saying Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito both believed the matter was correctly decided.

  “That’s what they said,” Kavanaugh responded, though he was still being vague on the issue of whether the right to privacy was applied correctly to the use of contraceptives.

  “Do you believe the right to privacy protects a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy?” she asked.

  Kavanaugh obfuscated. Harris quoted Ruth Bader Ginsburg from her confirmation hearing in 1993: “This is something central to a woman’s life, to her dignity. It’s a decision she must make for herself. And when government controls that decision for her, she’s being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”

  Kavanaugh continued dodging, most likely because he thought he knew where Harris was headed. In reality, Harris was headed down a path that caught Kavanaugh unaware:

  “Respectfully, Judge, as it relates to this hearing, you’re not answering that question, and we can move on,” Harris said.

  In a way that seemed like almost an afterthought, she asked, “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?”

  Kavanaugh played dumb, asking if she had a more specific question.

  “I’ll repeat the question,” Harris said. “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?”

  Cornered, with a hushed audience and the cameras close up on his face, he replied, “I’m not—I’m not—I’m not thinking of any right now, Senator.”

  Of course he wasn’t. There are no such laws.

  The exchange was picked up in news stories that day. Cable pundits discussed it. It became a classic viral moment. Planned Parenthood and other advocates of women’s right to control their own bodies pinned it to their pages.

  Unlike Kavanaugh, the Yale-Yale man who had graduated at the top of his classes, Harris went to a public law school in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district and definitely was not at the top of her class. But she knew the law well enough, and she displayed the trial lawyer’s skill of asking a question that cut to the core of what was at stake.

  It was, however, a small victory, certainly not sufficient to derail Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Another development, unknown to all the senators except for Dianne Feinstein, would have an impact on the process.

  * * *

  On July 5, 2018, Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor from Palo Alto, California, called the receptionist for her congresswoman, Anna Eshoo, wanting to pass along information about what Kavanaugh did to her when he was seventeen and she was fifteen, some forty years earlier. She also wanted to somehow stop what she worried would happen: that Kavanaugh would be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. She also wanted to remain anonymous. Four days later, President Trump did what Blasey Ford feared by nominating Kavanaugh.

  Ford told Eshoo her story on July 20. Eshoo called Feinstein to inform her about it, without revealing Blasey Ford’s name. Feinstein asked Eshoo to have her constituent write her story in a letter. She did. Feinstein, honoring Blasey Ford’s confidentiality request, held the letter close, failing to tell even Democratic leaders
about it. Time was ticking away. In her book about Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Supreme Ambition, Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post writes that, on September 9, with Kavanaugh’s confirmation seemingly assured, Eshoo spoke to Harris, telling her about the letter and saying “that nothing seemed to have been done about the allegation.”

  Harris, Marcus writes, was furious and called Feinstein, “demanding answers about this secret letter.” Democratic senators convened in a private caucus and confronted Feinstein. Marcus quotes Harris as telling Feinstein that there would be repercussions: “You’ve got to figure this out.”

  In the days ahead, pieces of the story began leaking in the Intercept and the New Yorker. Then on September 16, Blasey Ford went public with her allegations in an explosive story in the Washington Post. Blasey Ford didn’t remember all the details of what happened forty years earlier or even the year. But she alleged that Kavanaugh and his prep school friend Mark Judge maneuvered her into an upstairs bedroom at a party in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., and that Kavanaugh pinned her down and groped her while also trying to take her clothes off. When she tried to scream, she said, a drunken Kavanaugh put his hand over her mouth to mute her screams.

  “I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” the Washington Post story quoted her as saying. Ford said she escaped when someone jumped on top of them, sending them all to the floor.

  The allegations set off a remarkable series of accusations between supporters of Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh. Democrats and Republicans on the Judiciary Committee bickered and sniped, and people in and out of the Senate questioned why Feinstein failed to let the rest of the world in on the allegations contained in Blasey Ford’s letter.

  Feinstein responded with a statement: “That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities.”