This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 3rd, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Senator Kamala Harris's pronouncements about criminal justice reform stand at odds with her history as a sometimes

needlessly harsh prosecutor in California. Elizabeth Nolan Brown is associate editor at Reason magazine.

Her new cover feature in Reason is entitled,

Kamala Harris is a cop who wants to be president.

I think the most essential thing is that it seems like her impulses are very authoritarian or she's never

hesitant to be authoritarian in what she goes after. It shifts what she goes after based on

politics and based on what's popular at the time, but it doesn't feel like she's a strong

ideologue, she's not going after things because, in an authoritarian way

because she has some sort of strong conviction one way or the other, but she's

just pretty much willing to sort of use authoritarian means for

whatever is popular and will make her more popular.

Okay well give you an example of that. That's a kind of I mean it's a broad question it's a broad question, it's a broad statement, but you mean an example of, you know, the, where

her statements have conflicted with her actions with respect to say being a prosecutor.

When she was campaigning to be district attorney of San Francisco, she talked a lot about how she was going to be tough on crime but also smart on crime and she was going to you know not use

the the three strikes rule that was if you got you know two felonies and then you got a

third felony you were going to be put in jail for I think it's life or 25 to life or something

and so she was not going to use that she was going to realize that you know

drug minor drug crimes weren't you know weren't necessarily it wasn't

worth it to put people in jail and have this whole system she talked a lot about a sort

of you know a holistic approach even even from the beginning she did sort of

...