Kamala Harris faces intense Republican opposition on Capitol Hill

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NEW YORK – Freshman Senator Kamala Harris from California is not being treated so fairly on Capitol Hill.

On Wednesday, Harris was interrupted multiple times by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as she was insistent on him answering her questions about the ongoing investigation of the possible ties between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.

According to AJC.com, the exchange between the two was intense, leading Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr to interrupt Harris asking her to suspend her case, saying she was being disrespectful.

Once the hearing was over, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a senior Democrat on the panel, tweeted that Harris was “getting facts onto the record” mentioning the fact that he wasn’t interrupted when asking tough questions.

Harris has been known for her “powerful voice and a history of taking on the right opponents while she was attorney general.”

“Now that she has gotten adjusted to her new job, her power will be maximized if she takes the time to build relationships and genuine partnerships with national progressive groups and intellectual leaders — and merges her strengths with the strengths of others to move big ideas forward,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

According to the Washington Post, she has also been calling out Trump on basically every issue that has surfaced including the changes he made to immigration enforcement demanding federal agents and officers to enforce the laws that are in the books by deporting people who have broken immigration laws and was against the administration’s proposed travel ban.

Harris focused her first piece of legislation on guaranteeing access to legal counsel for those detained upon entering the country and she also opposed 32 of Trump’s 38 nominees in roll call votes putting her in an exclusive group of anti-Trumpers along with Ms. Warren and Sen. Bernard Sanders, as well as Sen. Corey A. Booker of New Jersey and Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York.

She described some of them in a horrific way, arguing that Betsy DeVos lacked the basic expertise to lead the Department of Education and said that as attorney general, Jeff Sessions did not fight for the civil rights of all populations.

“I am going to get mad when we have an attorney general who is trying to reinstate the war on drugs, and he thinks the greatest evil that mankind has ever seen is marijuana,” Harris said last week at the Code Conference.

Harris was one of 11 Democrats to oppose Kelly, Trump’s pick for homeland security secretary, as he didn’t appear too promising on what he said about trying to deport the young adult illegal immigrants, known as Dreamers, and criticized Trump’s push to build a wall along the Mexican border.

Mike McKenna, a Republican Party strategist, compared Harris to Obama saying that they have a lot in common like a weird name, being a biracial minority from donor-rich California, staying far too the left side within the Democratic Party and eyeing a presidential run just during her first term in Washington.

“So she is like Elizabeth Warren with a better cash situation, a better demographic situation and probably a slightly more pleasant personality in a party that is unlikely to ever nominate a white man again at the top of its ticket,” Mr. McKenna said. “It is a pretty powerful combination. It is just a matter of time before everybody discovers her.”

Although there are talks of her becoming the Democratic Party’s Presidential bid in 2020, Harris seems to be quite far from it herself.

“I am not giving that any consideration,” she said at the Code Conference on digital technology last week in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. “I’ve got to stay focused. There is so much happening right now. That is what I am focused on.”

Robert Salazar, a veteran political consultant in California said her brand of politics is appealing to the Democrats with wide-range. “If there are people who are able to unify your progressive and so-called establishment members of the Democratic Party, it is going to be someone like Kamala Harris,” he said. “You saw it with Obama. It is a very rare mixture of passion and professionalism that is hard to come across in politics,” he added.

Jim Demers, a veteran Democratic Party consultant in New Hampshire, said that “she has a reputation for being very articulate, an up-and-coming star, a female, and I think the voters are really going to be serious about dramatic change after four years of Trump.”