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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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I don't think there's anything special that Gabbard did in that debate to make Kamala selfdestruct. She just asked her about the laughing about smoking weed after locking people up for smoking weed. Kamala had no answer prepared and in general isn't great at thinking on her feet. Kamala's prep needs to be better this time, otherwise it could be a repeat of the dem debates which could be catastropic in a close race.
Honestly the whole thing that she "eviscerated" her in the debate (as the New York Times put it) is a bunch of horseshit.
Here's the exchange. I think Harris was a little taken aback because it was at least 50% complete fabrications, and that's harder to deal with in a debate setting than in a prosecutorial setting. It's fair to say she handled it a little poorly and Gabbard did a good job at landing the dishonest attacks. But most of what it accomplished, at the end of the day, was to accelerate the putting of those lies into the public discourse in a big way as talking points, alongside the idea that if anyone in Harris's office was prosecuting people who broke the law at the time, that represents a fair reason to attack Harris today because obviously what she should have been doing was letting them go and instructing every prosecutor in California to do the same, and that wouldn't have caused any problems.
Hopefully Harris is prepared for that, because a heap of fabrications (or blatant lies as most people would call them) is exactly what she will be getting from Trump.
FYI it's pretty normal for DA's to juat say were not gonna prosecute a crime. This is just the first result when I searched for examples with weed:
https://www.newschannel5.com/news/nashville-da-will-no-longer-prosecute-minor-marijuana-possession-charges
Also if she has trouble countering lies, she'll get smoked by Trump so prep is really important here.
Nashville had already decriminalized weed as of 2016. I only find one other case (Houston) where it was a prosecutor making a policy decision not to prosecute weed, ahead of the rest of the government. Honestly, just read the rest of the article you cited -- it matters that a lot of the rest of the city government was on board for it, but it still left a little bit of a confusing way to go about it even after decriminalization, which the chief of police among some other people pointed out, along with the idea that yes weed should be legal so maybe it's a good thing.
Left unsaid in among all of that is that selective enforcement by police and prosecutors in almost every case works out, in practice even up to the modern day, to be racist selective enforcement. Honestly it's better for the legislature just to make it legal. I'm not trying to throw cold water on any prosecutor who wants to take the initiative to do a good thing if they can make sure it'll work out right, but generally, the prosecutorial portion of the government isn't where you want to be making your creative departures from the law the way the legislators wrote it down.
I do see that Nashville had decriminalized it in 2016, but it's kinda weird since the article I posted definitely acts like it was still criminalized in 2020. I can't find where the chief of police says anything about it being decriminalized, in the article he just says
Maybe a bad article or it had be recriminalized?
It sounds to me like the Nashville city government (mayor and prosecutor and part of the city council) sort of decriminalized it on their own unofficially, even with it being still illegal by state law. Which is… kind of fine. It’s messy but whatever if it keeps people out of jail I’m fine with it. I mean that’s what the states did already that got us to this point.
My whole point was just that having the DA lead the process isn’t the normal way to do it, and that’s not how it happened even in Nashville, and attacking Kamala Harris for this wide variety of half-truthful bullshit including that it’s all her fault that California still had some level of criminalization when she was DA and that makes her automatically a bad person, is IMO a variety of half truthful bullshit.
Ah I get what you're saying, I think the smart money would have been to lie about whether she smoked weed. Could have avoided all of this lol.
"Decriminalization" doesn't mean "its legal", it means "Its illegal but the state is not obligated to prosecute."
Typically it means there is no criminal offense to prosecute. It turns it into the equivalant of a speeding ticket.
She wasn't a District Attorney, she was Attorney General for the state of California.
AGs don't have the same prosecutorial discretion that DAs have.
Harris better be ready this time because I assume Trump will be coached to try that jab too.
It's an easy question to answer. "I smoked weed in college, my position on cannabis as AG followed both the Democratic and Republican party positions at the time, and I advocate today for recreational legalization and restorative justice for those who suffered under the war on drugs."