What Kamala Harris's career as a prosecutor and senator says about how she would govern as president

As California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris championed criminal-justice reforms, but still defended the state’s use of the death penalty. As a U.S. senator, she pushed for expanding access to college and cosponsored the Green New Deal. As vice president, she largely hewed to the Biden agenda, taking high-profile roles on immigration and abortion but rarely stepping away from the president’s policy shadow.

So what does her past record tell voters about the priorities she would pursue from the White House if she wins in November?

The bills she sponsored (or cosponsored) and the issues she touted in the Senate and as a candidate in the 2020 presidential race suggest an even more progressive outlook than President Biden, who touted himself as a climate warrior and staunch abortion defender who sought to make college free for millions.

Rep. Mark Pocan, chair emeritus of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said he thinks Harris’s platform won’t differ too much from Biden’s.

“I think people are looking for much of what was in the Build Back Better agenda,” he said, referring to the president’s sweeping plan when he came into office in 2021 to expand affordable housing, aggressively fight climate change, reduce drug prices, and provide free and universal pre-school, among a myriad of progressive policies.

Pocan also said that with roughly 100 days until the election, “I wouldn’t look for a complete reinvention of the campaign.”

In Harris's role as Senate president over the last three-and-a-half years, she cast 33 tie-breaking votes—the most by a vice president in history—including one to pass Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act.

Her record of legislative accomplishments in the Senate, where she spent four years before becoming vice president, is relatively thin, not uncommon for a relative newcomer with little seniority. Her most notable moments came as a member of the Judiciary Committee grilling then-President Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, notably Brett Kavanaugh.

Here are some policy areas where she could make a mark if she becomes the first Black and Asian American woman to be president:

Energy/environment

Over the last three years, Biden has billed himself as the most climate-friendly president to date. During his administration, the Inflation Reduction Act became the largest piece of climate legislation signed into law, thanks to Harris’s tie-breaking vote.

Harris’s energy and climate agenda is expected to be even more progressive.

As a longtime Green New Deal champion and one of its original cosponsors, Harris falls further left when it comes to energy and climate policy. The non-binding resolution introduced in 2019 called for net-zero global emissions by 2050 (similar to Biden’s own goal) and also promoted ambitious goals—cleaner agricultural practices, retrofitting all buildings to make them climate-friendly, and meeting 100 percent of energy needs through renewable sources.

Harris’s energy record as a senator earned a 90 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, only losing points for votes she missed while on the campaign trail.

“Whether holding polluters accountable as San Francisco District Attorney and California Attorney General, leading the charge on electric school buses in the U.S. Senate, or casting the deciding vote on the biggest investment ever in climate, clean energy and environmental justice and leading on climate on the world stage as Vice President, Kamala Harris has long been a climate champion,” LCV Action Fund Senior Vice President of Government Affairs Tiernan Sittenfeld said in a press release endorsing Harris.

During Harris’s time as California’s attorney general, she sued the Obama administration’s Interior Department over fracking off the state’s coastline, as part of her effort to protect communities and natural resources. She also proposed a ban on fracking as a candidate for president, but later abandoned that position.

Health

As vice president, Harris saw substantial health care goals come to fruition, including allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain high-cost drugs. But her legislative legacy in Congress indicates she could be open to going further left.

As a senator, Harris signed on to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s more expansive vision of this authority, which would have entirely struck the restriction on drug-price negotiations rather than just amending it. If negotiations failed, the bill stipulated drug prices would be tied to what other federal agencies and foreign countries pay for the drugs.

She also signed onto another Sanders bill that would create a national health insurance program, known as the Medicare for All Act, and cosponsored a bill with Sen. Michael Bennet to create a public option for health benefits.

The former California lawmaker was very active on issues related to maternal health. She sponsored the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2020, which would have created a task force across several agencies focused on the social determinants of health for prenatal and postpartum women. The legislation also called for investing in community-based programs to improve the health outcomes of Black mothers.

At the time, Harris supported legislation that would prevent states from enacting restrictions around abortion access. This is before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, effectively ending the national right to an abortion. During her 2019 presidential campaign, she suggested a plan where states with a history of restricting abortion access would need to get federal approval before their laws could be enforced.

Criminal justice

As a district attorney in San Francisco—where she was the first woman elected to the role—Harris perhaps became most famous for officiating some of the first same-sex marriages in the country in 2004. But her judicial history, from criminal justice to serving on the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, spans throughout her nearly 35-year law career.

Her judicial and legal career in the state of California is often met with mixed reviews from those in her own party. In San Francisco, Harris opposed the death penalty, but as attorney general in California, she defended the state’s use of the punishment.

Harris worked to lower California’s recidivism rates, led initiatives toward wider public access of policing records, launched a program requiring that special agents wear body cameras, and trained police in implicit bias—moves that helped fuel conservative criticism that she was soft on crime.

In the early 2000s, Harris’s office rejected new DNA testing for Kevin Cooper, a Black man on death row who claimed he was wrongfully arrested for a quadruple murder. It was an issue raised during a 2019 debate during Harris's campaign for president. In 2018, she wrote in a statement that “as a firm believer in DNA testing, I hope the governor and the state will allow for such testing in the case of Kevin Cooper.”

She also began her career with a more conservative stance on marijuana in California. She opposed a legalization measure in 2010 and didn’t take a stance for a different legalization measure in 2016. Her prosecutors in San Francisco convicted nearly 2,000 people for weed violations.

Harris's stances have evolved, and she now often says on the trail that “nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed.” In 2019, she introduced legislation at the federal level to decriminalize and tax marijuana.

In addition, Harris has proposed legislation directing federal funds to programs which provide alternatives to bail systems that use money as a pre-trial release condition. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, cash bail is often discriminatory, “with Black and Latino men assessed higher bail amounts than white men for similar crimes by 35 and 19 percent on average, respectively.”

She also authored legislation creating grants for nonprofits and government organizations to to train public defenders, court-appointed attorneys, and contract attorneys.

In the Senate, she proposed increased federal oversight of the criminal justice system, with a goal to both tighten anti-discrimination laws and open funding to alternative justice programs designed to mitigate the prejudicial effects of certain judicial proceedings.

She introduced 13 pieces of crime- and law-enforcement-related legislation and was the lead sponsor on the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, a bipartisan bill designating lynching a federal hate crime. Largely symbolic, the bill represented a major victory for its corrective efforts in righting the racial wrongs of America’s past and shedding light on the discriminatory blindspots of America’s present. Though the Senate passed it unanimously in 2018, the bill didn’t make it through the House of Representatives.

As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018, Harris forcefully questioned Kavanaugh over sexual-misconduct allegations that had been made against him. She also led a call in 2019 to impeach Kavanaugh over later-unveiled sexual-misconduct allegations.

And her campaign will likely focus on that distinction between herself and Trump—prosecutor vs. felon.

An ad from her 2020 primary campaign narrates, “She prosecuted sex predators. He is one. She shut down for-profit colleges that swindled Americans. He was a for-profit college— literally. He’s owned by the big banks. She’s the attorney general who beat the biggest banks in America and forced them to pay homeowners $18 billion.”

Tech

Harris began her career in the shadow of Silicon Valley, and those tech connections have stayed with her since she came to Washington, where she consistently brought in big donations from tech executives and venture capitalists.

Her connections to Silicon Valley may have helped soften her views of big tech compared to some of her Democratic colleagues who have called for antitrust action that would break up some of the largest companies, including Amazon, Apple, and Google.

In 2020, when Harris was running to be the Democratic presidential nominee, she told The New York Times that she had no plans to break up big tech, but rather supported data-privacy regulations.

“My first priority is going to be that we ensure that privacy is something that is intact,” she said while refusing to say whether she would look to break up the big tech companies.

The Biden administration has aggressively gone after big tech companies and is currently working antitrust cases against Google, Amazon, and Apple. There is no indication that Harris would reverse the course of those cases.

Though she has had good relations with big tech, she has shown a willingness to go after the tech sector. In 2014, as California’s attorney general, Harris reached a settlement agreement with eBay, requiring the company to pay $4 million for non-competitive hiring practices.

Harris launched a crusade against “revenge porn,” or the unauthorized online sharing of intimate images.

In 2013, she launched an investigation into Kevin Bollaert, who ran the revenge porn site UGotPosted, and a sister site, ChangeMyReputation.com, that would charge people to have their photos taken down from UGotPosted. Bollaert was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison in a case that helped soften the edges of the Section 230 online-liability shield.

Education

Harris has been a longtime advocate for bold education reform, and while her past legislative efforts and policy positions align closely with Biden’s, a Harris presidency could advance more-progressive education policies.

As a senator, Harris cosponsored Sanders’s College for All Act of 2017, which aimed to make community colleges free for all students and public two- and four-year institutions tuition-free for families with incomes below $125,000. She also supported a measure to cover additional college expenses beyond tuition for working and middle-class students.

During her 2020 presidential bid, Harris pushed for universal pre-K programs and debt-free college, declaring education a fundamental right. She also unveiled a $315 billion plan to boost teacher salaries over a decade, calling for a $13,500 raise for all teachers by the end of her first term.

Two Senate Democrats last year reintroduced the Debt-Free College Act, which would create a federal-state partnership to make college debt-free for students within five years. If Harris is elected president, it is possible she could champion the progressive legislation, which the Biden-Harris administration does not currently endorse.

Biden and Harris overlap in terms of their support for universal pre-K, delivering student-loan relief, investing in Title I schools, and increasing teacher support and pay. But there have been some past points of contention between the two on the issue of education.

Harris slammed Biden during a 2020 primary debate over his opposition to federally mandated busing in the 1970s as a method to desegregate schools.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to schools every day,” Harris said. “And that little girl was me.”

She has also been critical of parts of her own record on education from her time as San Francisco's district attorney. She said in 2019 that she regrets pushing for a 2011 state law that allowed district attorneys to charge parents with a misdemeanor if their children had unexcused absences totaling 10 percent of the school year.

“My regret is that I have now heard stories where in some jurisdictions DAs have criminalized the parents,” Harris said in a Pod Save America interview. “I regret that that has happened and the thought that anything I did could have led to that. That certainly wasn’t the intention.”