Biography, Net Worth, Family, Political Career And Education Of Kamala Harris

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Biography, Net Worth, Family, Political Career And Education Of Kamala Harris

Kamala Devi Harris (/ˈkɑːmələ/ KAH-mə-lə, born October 20, 1964) is an American politician and attorney who is the vice president-elect of the United States. A member of the Democratic Party, she is set to assume office on January 20, 2021, alongside president-elect Joe Biden, having defeated incumbent President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in the 2020 presidential election. Harris has served as the junior United States senator from California since 2017. Harris will be the first Indian-American, the first African-American, and the first female vice president in U.S. history, and thus, the highest-ranking female elected official in United States history. Harris is a multiracial American.

Born in Oakland, California, Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, before being recruited to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and later the City Attorney of San Francisco’s office. In 2003, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco. She was elected Attorney General of California in 2010 and re-elected in 2014.

Harris defeated Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 Senate election to become the second African American woman and the first South Asian American to serve in the United States Senate. As a senator, she has advocated for healthcare reform, federal descheduling of cannabis, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the DREAM Act, a ban on assault weapons, and progressive tax reform. She gained a national profile for her pointed questioning of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings, including Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault.

Harris ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and attracted national attention before ending her campaign on December 3, 2019. She was announced as Biden’s running mate on August 11, 2020. On November 7, 2020, the race was called in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket. She will be the second vice president of significant non-European ancestry, following Charles Curtis, who served from 1929 to 1933 alongside President Herbert Hoover.

Biography, Net Worth, Family, Political Career And Education Of Kamala Harris

Early life and education (1964–1990)

Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a biologist whose work on the progesterone receptor gene stimulated work in breast cancer research, had arrived in the U.S. from Tamil Nadu in India in 1958 as a 19-year-old graduate student in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley; Gopalan received her PhD in 1964. Her father, Donald J. Harris, is a Stanford University professor emeritus of economics, who arrived in the U.S. from British Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study at UC Berkeley, receiving a PhD in economics in 1966.

Along with her younger sister, Maya, Harris lived in Berkeley, California, briefly on Milvia Street in central Berkeley, then a duplex on Bancroft Way in West Berkeley, an area often called “the flatlands”[24] with a significant black population.

When Harris began kindergarten, she was bused as part of Berkeley’s comprehensive desegregation program to Thousand Oaks Elementary School, a public school in a more prosperous neighborhood in northern Berkeley[24] which previously had been 95 percent white, and after the desegregation plan went into effect became 40 percent Black.[25]

A neighbor regularly took the Harris girls to an African American church in Oakland where they sang in the children’s choir. Their mother introduced them to Hinduism and took them to a nearby Hindu temple, where she occasionally sang.

As children, she and her sister visited their mother’s family in Madras (now Chennai) several times.[29] She says she has been strongly influenced by her maternal grandfather P. V. Gopalan, a retired Indian civil servant whose progressive views on democracy and women’s rights impressed her. Harris has remained in touch with her Indian aunts and uncles throughout her adult life. Harris has also visited her father’s family in Jamaica.[31]

Her parents divorced when she was seven. Harris has said that when she and her sister visited their father in Palo Alto on weekends, other children in the neighborhood were not allowed to play with them because they were black.[29] When she was twelve, Harris and her sister moved with their mother to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where Shyamala had accepted a research and teaching position at the McGill University-affiliated Jewish General Hospital.[32] She attended a French-speaking primary school, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges,[33] and then Westmount High School in Westmount, Quebec, graduating in 1981.

On November 7, 2020, CBC News interviewed Wanda Kagan, a high school friend of Kamala.[35] Kagan described Kamala as her best friend, and described how she confided in Harris that she was being molested by her stepfather. She said that Kamala told her mother who then insisted she come to live with them, for the remainder of her final year of high school. Kagan said Kamala had recently told her that their friendship, and playing a role in countering Wanda’s exploitation, helped form the commitment Harris felt in protecting women and children, when Harris was a prosecutor.

After high school, Harris attended Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C. While at Howard, she interned as a mail room clerk for California senator Alan Cranston, chaired the economics society, led the debate team and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.[36][37] Harris graduated from Howard in 1986 with a degree in political science and economics.

Harris then returned to California to attend law school at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law through its Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP).[38] While at UC Hastings, she served as president of its chapter of the Black Law Students Association.[39] She graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1989[40] and was admitted to the California Bar in June 1990.[41]

U.S. Senate (2017–present)

Election

After 24 years as California’s junior senator, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) announced her intention to retire from the United States Senate at the end of her term in 2016. Harris was the first candidate to declare her intention to run for Boxer’s senate seat. Harris officially announced the launch of her campaign on January 13, 2015.[226] Harris was a top contender from the beginning of her campaign: weeks after she announced her campaign, a survey by Public Policy Polling showed her leading in a hypothetical match-up against Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, 41 percent to 16 percent.[227] Current and former statewide elected officials John Chiang, John Garamendi, Bill Lockyer, Gavin Newsom, and Alex Padilla declined to run.

In February 2016, the California Democratic Party voted at its convention to endorse Harris, who received nearly eighty percent of the vote.[232] Three months later, Governor Jerry Brown endorsed her.[233]

In the June 7 primary, Harris came in first with forty percent of the vote and won by pluralities in most counties.[234] On July 19, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden endorsed Harris.[235]

Harris faced congresswoman and fellow Democrat Loretta Sanchez in the general election.[236] It was the first time a Republican did not appear in a general election for the Senate since California began directly electing senators in 1914.[237] In the November 2016 election, Harris defeated Sanchez, capturing over sixty percent of the vote, carrying all but four counties.[238] Following her victory, she promised to protect immigrants from the policies of President-elect Donald Trump and announced her intention to remain Attorney General through the end of 2016.[239][240]

2020 presidential election

Presidential campaign

Harris had been considered a top contender and potential frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president.[290] In June 2018, she was quoted as “not ruling it out”.[291] In July 2018, it was announced that she would publish a memoir, a sign of a possible run.[292] On January 21, 2019, Harris officially announced her candidacy for president of the United States in the 2020 United States presidential election.[293] In the first 24 hours after her candidacy announcement, she tied a record set by Bernie Sanders in 2016 for the most donations raised in the day following an announcement.[294] More than 20,000 people attended her formal campaign launch event in her hometown of Oakland, California, on January 27, according to a police estimate.[295]

During the first Democratic presidential debate in June 2019, Harris scolded former vice president Joe Biden for “hurtful” remarks he made, speaking fondly of senators who opposed integration efforts in the 1970s and working with them to oppose mandatory school bussing.[296] Harris’s support rose by between six and nine points in polls following that debate.[297] In the second debate in August, Harris was confronted by Biden and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard over her record as Attorney General.[298] The San Jose Mercury News assessed that some of Gabbard’s and Biden’s accusations were on point, such as blocking the DNA testing of a death row inmate, while others did not stand up to scrutiny. In the immediate aftermath, Harris fell in the polls following that debate.[299][300] Over the next few months her poll numbers fell to the low single digits.[301] At a time when liberals were increasingly concerned about the excesses of the criminal justice system, Harris faced criticism from reformers for tough-on-crime policies she pursued while she was California’s attorney general. For example, in 2014, she decided to defend California’s death penalty in court.[302]

Prior to and during her presidential campaign an online informal organization using the hashtag #KHive formed to support her candidacy and defend her from racist and sexist attacks.[303][304][305][306] According to the Daily Dot, Joy Reid first used the term in an August 2017 tweet saying “@DrJasonJohnson @ZerlinaMaxwell and I had a meeting and decided it’s called the K-Hive.”[307]

On December 3, 2019, Harris withdrew from seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination, citing a shortage of funds.[308] In March 2020, Harris endorsed Joe Biden for president.[309]

Vice presidential campaign

In May 2019, senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus endorsed the idea of a Biden–Harris ticket.[310] In late February, Biden won a landslide victory in the 2020 South Carolina Democratic primary with the endorsement of House whip Jim Clyburn, with more victories on Super Tuesday. In early March, Clyburn suggested Biden choose a black woman as a running mate, commenting that “African American women needed to be rewarded for their loyalty.”[311] In March, Biden committed to choosing a woman for his running mate.[312]

On April 17, 2020, Harris responded to media speculation and said she “would be honored” to be Biden’s running mate.[313] In late May, in relation to the death of George Floyd and ensuing protests and demonstrations, Biden faced renewed calls to select a black woman to be his running mate, highlighting the law enforcement credentials of Harris and Val Demings.[314]

On June 12, The New York Times reported that Harris was emerging as the frontrunner to be Biden’s running mate, as she is the only African American woman with the political experience typical of vice presidents.[315] On June 26, CNN reported that more than a dozen people close to the Biden search process considered Harris one of Biden’s top four contenders, along with Elizabeth Warren, Val Demings, and Keisha Lance Bottoms.

On August 11, 2020, Biden announced that he had chosen Harris; she is the first African American, the first Indian American, and the third woman after Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin to be picked as the vice-presidential nominee for a major party ticket.

LGBT rights

Opposing Prop 8

In 2008, California voters passed Prop 8, a state constitutional amendment providing that only marriages “between a man and a woman” are valid. Legal challenges were made by opponents soon after its approval, and a pair of same-sex couples filed a lawsuit against the initiative in federal court in the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger (later Hollingsworth v. Perry). In their 2010 campaigns, California attorney general Jerry Brown and Harris both pledged to not defend Prop 8.

After being elected, Harris declared her office would not defend the marriage ban, leaving the task to Prop 8’s proponents.[160] In February 2013, Harris filed an amicus curiae brief, arguing Prop 8 was unconstitutional and that the initiative’s sponsors did not have legal standing to represent California’s interests by defending the law in federal court.[161] In June 2013, the Supreme Court ruled, 5–4, that Prop 8’s proponents lacked legal standing to defend it in federal court.[162] The next day Harris delivered a speech in downtown Los Angeles urging the Ninth Circuit to lift the stay banning same-sex marriages as soon as possible.[163] The stay was lifted two days later.

Gay and trans panic defense ban

In 2014, Attorney General Kamala Harris co-sponsored legislation to ban the gay and trans panic defense in court, which passed and California became the first state with such legislation. Legislation like this is meant to address hate crimes.

Sex crimes

In 2011, Harris obtained a guilty plea and a four-year prison sentence from a stalker who used Facebook and social engineering techniques to illegally access the private photographs of women whose social media accounts he hijacked. Harris commented that the Internet had “opened up a new frontier for crime”.[198] Later that year, Harris created the eCrime Unit within the California Department of Justice, a 20-attorney unit specifically targeting technology crimes.[199] In 2015, several purveyors of so-called “revenge porn” sites based in California were arrested, charged with felonies, and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.[200][201] In the first prosecution of its kind in the United States, Kevin Bollaert was convicted on 21 counts of identity theft and six counts of extortion and sentenced to 18 years in prison.[202] Harris brought up these cases when California Congresswoman Katie Hill was targeted for similar cyber exploitation by her ex-husband and forced to resign in late 2019.[203]

In 2016, Harris announced the arrest of Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer on felony charges of pimping a minor, pimping, and conspiracy to commit pimping. The warrant alleged that 99 percent of Backpage’s revenue was directly attributable to prostitution-related ads, many of which involved victims of sex trafficking, including children under the age of 18.[204] The pimping charge against Ferrer was dismissed by the California courts in 2016 on the grounds of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, but in 2018, Ferrer pleaded guilty in California to money laundering and agreed to give evidence against the former co-owners of Backpage.[205] Ferrer simultaneously pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution in Texas state court and Arizona federal court.[205][206] Under pressure, Backpage announced that it was removing its adult section from all its U.S. sites.[207] Harris welcomed the move, saying, “I look forward to them shutting down completely.”[208] The investigations continued after she became a senator, and, in April 2018, Backpage and affiliated sites were seized by federal law enforcement.

Biography, Net Worth, Family, Political Career And Education Of Kamala Harris

Awards and honors

In 2005, National Black Prosecutors Association awarded Harris the Thurgood Marshall Award. That year, she was featured along 19 other women in a Newsweek report profiling “20 of America’s Most Powerful Women”.[319] In 2006, Harris was elected to the National District Attorneys Association’s Board of Directors as vice president and appointed to co-chair its Corrections and Re-Entry Committee. She was also selected to co-chair the California District Attorneys Association’s sex crimes committee.[320] That same year, Howard University awarded Harris its Outstanding Alumni Award for “extraordinary work in the fields of law and public service”.[321] In 2008, she was named as one of the 34 Attorneys of the Year by California Lawyer magazine. A New York Times article published later that year also identified her as a woman with potential to become president of the United States, highlighting her reputation as a “tough fighter”.[324]

In 2010, California’s largest legal newspaper The Daily Journal designated Harris as one of the top 75 women litigators in the state, and one of the top 100 lawyers in the state.[325] In 2013, Time named Harris as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World”.[326] In 2016, the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center awarded Harris the Bipartisan Justice Award along with Senator Tim Scott.[327] In 2018, Harris was named the 2018 recipient of the ECOS Environmental Award for her leadership in environmental protection.

Vice President-elect of the United States

Following the election of Joe Biden as President of the United States in the 2020 presidential election, Harris will assume office as the vice president of the United States on January 20, 2021. She will be the first female in the office, as well as the first person of color to be vice president since Charles Curtis in 1929.

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