The Messy Business of Politics

Over five years ago, I opined in these pages about then U.S. Senator Kamala Harris and her dishonesty in securing $97,000 from California taxpayers as a member of the California Unemployment Insurance Board to which she was appointed in 1993 by her boyfriend Willie Brown, then-Assembly Speaker, while simultaneously paid by Alameda County taxpayers as an Alameda County deputy district attorney, supposedly a full-time endeavor. The following year (1994), she was named to the California Medical Commission at an even higher tax-paid salary which was increased in 1998 to $99,000 per year. Somehow, she evaded a state law prohibiting payment for two jobs which might result in conflicting responsibilities.

Harris did not, however, escape attention from the San Diego Union Tribute which noted that those two state commissions were often condemned by taxpayers for “allow(ing) politically connected people with no experience … to earn large salaries for jobs that are less than full-time.” The once-published muck-raking San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Savannah Blackwell wrote that Harris possessed no experience at her (then age 30) “to qualify her to oversee the work of 15 staff members who negotiate Medi-Cal reimbursement rates with state hospitals.”

She was just starting her self-serving governmental deviance. Raised in Berkeley and residing in S.F., she inveigled District Attorney Terence Hallinan to hire her as a deputy district attorney paid over $100,000 annually. How did she thank Terence who’s now deceased? She ran against him in 2003 to prevent Terence, a veteran criminal lawyer, from re-election. By 2003, San Francisco had foolishly been persuaded by Common Cause to adopt public financing of political campaigns for public office, another City Hall mistake to fleece taxpayers to pay money to political candidates. Eligibility rules for qualifying for such taxpayer money included a maximum campaign expenditure. For Harris, it was $211,000.

That didn’t deter this ambitious politician. Harris spent $1.15 million emanating from Pacific Heights “swells” and other donors. She was then the object of an Ethics Commission complaint for violating the public financing law. It wasn’t a new experience for this grifter. In 2000, while managing then-Supervisor Amos Brown’s campaign for re-election, she failed to notify the public of the mailing of two political Brown brochures within the time required by law. (Harris was then an Alameda County deputy district attorney.)

The Ethics Commission eventually found Harris guilty in 2003 of violating her signed declaration under penalty of perjury not to exceed $211,000 in campaign spending for S.F. district attorney. She sent an aide to try to withdraw her oath at the Ethics Commission which rejected such effort. The maximum penalty was $275,000 under San Francisco’s ordinance. The weak-kneed Ethics Commission also could have disqualified her and barred her from public office in San Francisco for five years. Instead, it fined her a mere $34,000 and she became our top prosecutor at the expense of the public servant who hired her and obeyed the public finance law, Terry Hallinan.

Harris, of course, should not even have been S.F.’s district attorney, as Blackwell observed in September 2005 in the former SFProgressive.com. Later, as a U.S. senator, Harris pretended she knew nothing about the December 2018 settlement of a harassment suit against a top aide in her office for $400,000 of taxpayer money. Political commentator Dan Walters wrote on Dec. 18, 2018, in Cal Matters, “It seems incredible that Harris would have been kept in the dark about a harassment allegation against one of her closest aides, and the secret payoff that made it go away. That’s especially true since Harris has made sexual harassment a touchstone in preparing for a presidential run.”

It has been said that: “A true test of a person’s character is not what that person does in the light, but what that person does in the dark.” Visualizing Ms. Harris as president of these United States makes me fear for the future of our country. Coupled with the Republican Party’s candidate, convicted felon Donald J. Trump, we Americans possess little choice on Nov. 5, 2024.

I’ve been voting since November 1949 and have never missed voting in a national, state or local election. Realizing California is a one-party state, and my vote means nothing as an Independent, I seek suggestions. Should I write myself in as president? No, I’m too old for the responsibilities of our commander-in-chief. Maybe “third party” aspirants will make the ballot.

I’m lost after U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance changed his opposition to Trump for selection as the draft dodger, cheater and liar’s vice-presidential candidate. Maybe another American will appear as Wendell Wilkie did futilely in 1940 or Harry S. Truman in 1948. For now, it’s bleak. Meanwhile, both candidates are college graduates, and it’s observed that: “College is a place that’s presumed to mold character, and some of the students turn out to be very moldy!”

To supply relief to our national political predicament, I learned late last month of a needed reconstruction of the American Independent Party, at least in California, under the leadership of Victor Marani, one-time aide to the late state Senator Henry Mello (Santa Cruz County), former Democratic Caucus chairman in the 1980s and ’90s when I was a state senator. That party was established in 1968 by then Democratic Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama to enable his candidacy for U.S. president and perpetuate segregation of African Americans. Its existence also affected adversely efforts four years ago to create in California an Independent Party because the California secretary of state ruled that you can’t qualify for the ballot from another political party with the word “Independent” in its name, which could confuse voters.

Now, with Mr. Marani as California chairman, the American Independent Party merits membership for voters like me who are officially labeled “No Party Preference” under bipartisan legislation enacted after I left the state senate in 1998 to eliminate Independent as a political appellation. As Mr. Marani of Aptos, California, in Santa Cruz County, declares: “It’s time for California to declare independence from the antiquated two-party system … and join the American Independent Party of California today!” It’s a new day for true Americans without deceased Alabama Gov. George Wallace and his discriminatory policies doctrine.

In a Jan. 4, 1953, This Week Magazine interview, Carl Sandberg said: “I see America not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us. I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun, fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible for men and women of will and vision.”

Quentin Kopp is a former San Francisco supervisor, state senator, SF Ethics Commission member, president of the California High Speed Rail Authority governing board and retired Superior Court judge.