Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown suggested that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) cares more about leading the 2020 resistance movement than so-called Dreamers.
In his San Francisco Chronicle column over the weekend, Brown said Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) vote in favor of an amnesty compromise bill sponsored by Sens. Angus King (I-ME) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) and Harris’s vote against it last week represented a Democratic Party that is splitting into competing factions.
Brown said the bill’s concessions, which included barring the parents of DACA recipients from becoming citizens and allocating $25 billion for a border wall in exchange for giving DACA recipients a pathway to citizenship, were “actually not as bad as what President Trump wants.” Groups like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pro-amnesty FWD.us even backed the bill.
“For Feinstein, this was all about practicality — she wanted to get something done for Dreamers, even if that meant accepting some provisions she didn’t agree with. It was totally in keeping with the Clintonian philosophy of the Democratic Party as it existed when Feinstein arrived in the Capitol in the 1990s,” Brown continued. “Harris represents the post-2016 Democratic Party, one that’s more interested in energizing the base and recruiting new constituencies than looking for a spot in the middle.”
Brown, who once dated Harris when she was nearly 40 years his junior, argued that Harris was thinking of potential 2020 left-wing primary voters and concluded that since Harris and Feinstein “did what their respective supporters wanted them to do… neither will suffer.”
“Not sure we can say the same for the Dreamers,” Brown concluded.
When Harris was one of three Democrats who voted “no” on the King-Rounds compromise, a staffer for a Senate Democrat went to Politico and ripped her for thinking more about potential caucus-goers in Iowa instead of so-called Dreamers.
“If Sen. Harris tries to use this ‘no’ vote to get to the left of her colleagues in Iowa … she’ll be rightly and roundly pummeled for it. Some Democrats fought for Dreamers today, others fought for themselves,” the frustrated staffer for the Senate Democrat reportedly said,