Kamala Harris in the Senate California senator gains prominence by grilling Trump officials, laying the groundwork for a likely 2020 presidential run

Kamala Harris in the Senate California senator gains prominence by grilling Trump officials, laying the groundwork for a likely 2020 presidential run

WASHINGTON — Sen. Kamala Harris’ communications director has a note in all capital letters stuck on her office computer: “Show the math.”

It’s a quote from her boss — one the senator uses frequently.

“There’s, I think, a running joke in the office about certain phrases I use all the time,” the California Democrat said. “This is how I would train lawyers, prosecutors about trial techniques: I’d say, ‘When you’re standing before the jury, in your closing argument ... show them the math.’ Instead of saying, ‘You must find 8,’ show them 2 plus 2 plus 2 plus 2.”

The “Kamalism,” as one former staffer called it, is far from the only remnant of her prosecutor past that followed her to Washington. That background has helped define Harris’ time in the Senate — which will draw intensive scrutiny if, as expected, she declares her candidacy for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Harris’ Senate colleagues frequently refer to her prosecutorial approach to the job, noting in particular her propensity for sharp questioning of Trump administration officials during committee hearings.

Harris foreshadowed that approach in her election night speech in which she emphasized her intention to “fight” in Washington. But she said she’s trying to use her bully pulpit to fight “not against something, (but) for something” — which has turned out to include issues as broad as immigration and income disparity and as specific as honoring historic victims of lynchings.

The emphasis on her lawyer past is also evidence of her adjustment to being a freshman legislator. Harris’ two years in the Senate have been the only ones of her career in a legislative body, and her impact has been more visible in public face-offs than in policy.

Harris’ tussles with President Trump’s nominees have earned her the most attention. Her interrogation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his August confirmation hearing about whether he had discussed the investigation into Russian election interference with anyone at a law firm connected to Trump gave C-SPAN one of its most-watched YouTube videos of the year.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Harris during a 2017 hearing that her rapid-fire questions made him “nervous. ... If I don’t qualify it, you’ll accuse me of lying. I’m not able to be rushed this fast.”

During a tense, interruption-filled exchange with John Kelly in 2017, the then-homeland security secretary asked, “Would you let me finish once?”

“Excuse me, I’m asking the questions,” Harris said, pressing on.

“It’s a constant pursuit of the truth. You know, ‘What happened?’” Harris, 54, said in an interview. “It’s not about me giving a beautiful speech in those hearings. It’s about finding out: Is our government doing its job? Are we being accountable? Are we being transparent? Are we conducting ourselves consistent with the mores and the values of our country?”

That style has been polarizing. Her supporters praise it as a no-nonsense form of oversight. Her detractors describe it as inappropriate or grandstanding.

Former Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller set off a firestorm when he said her questioning of Sessions was “hysterical.” After Harris pressured Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in an Intelligence Committee hearing about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s independence, panel Chairman Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., cut her off and said she wasn’t giving Rosenstein “the courtesy ... for questions to get answered.”

The episode prompted a tweet from Sen. Elizabeth Warren with the “#NeverthelessShePersisted” hashtag that the Massachusetts Democrat herself inspired.

But even her Republican colleagues who sparred with her during those hearings say they respect Harris’ sharpness.

Book Review: ‘The Truths We Hold,’ by Kamala Harris

“She’s quite a fighter, and you saw that between me and her on the Kavanaugh hearings,” said GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee. “She’s always treated me fairly and ... if I were in the minority and I didn’t want someone like Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, I probably would have taken the same approach.”

“I’m not sure I’d necessarily want to be a witness in front of her,” said Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who chairs the homeland security committee.

“Some Kavanaugh stuff wasn’t my cup of tea, but I think she’s very bright, has a good personality,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the new chair of the Judiciary Committee. “Anybody who underestimates her will do so at their own peril.”

Harris’ legislative record is thin, not a surprise for a first-term senator in the minority party, but already a potential talking point for those taking aim at her ambitions.

“She’s pretty new at it, as we all were at one time,” said Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn. “But I guess President (Barack) Obama demonstrated you didn’t have to stay here and develop much of a record in order to run for president.”

A presidential run would invite close examination of Harris’ work in the Senate for clues about how she might govern. Much of that work speaks to the Democrats’ progressive base.

She was the first Democratic senator to announce she would co-sponsor Medicare for All legislation from Sen. Bernie Sanders, independent-Vt. She was one of just three Democrats to vote against compromise legislation that would have protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children from deportation, in exchange for other cuts to legal immigration visas and $25 billion for Trump’s wall and other border security measures. Harris called the wall money a waste and said the overall bill would have advanced Trump’s “anti-immigrant” agenda.

In late 2018, Harris introduced her approach to helping working families through tax credits to alleviate the strain of rising housing prices and other cost-of-living increases. Harris said she was “so damn excited” about the legislation and that she had spent nearly her entire two years in office working on it, trying to achieve something “meaningful and relevant and substantial.”

Perhaps her most-recognized legislative achievement came in the final week of the last congressional term, when a bill she co-sponsored with the only other African Americans in the Senate, Democrat Cory Booker of New Jersey and Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina, to make lynching a federal crime passed the Senate unanimously. Harris noted that Congress has repeatedly failed to pass such legislation since 1882 and said the Senate vote “offered some long-overdue justice and recognition to the victims of lynching crimes.”

The bill, however, still hasn’t become law: The House failed to take it up before Congress adjourned, meaning it would have to be reintroduced and pass both chambers again.

Harris has also partnered with Republicans on other pieces of ultimately unsuccessful legislation, including a bail reform bill with Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and an election security measure with Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma.

Harris’ colleagues from both parties describe her as affable and focused, with a command of key issues and an ability to ask skilled questions. They also cite her preparation and her friendliness with all lawmakers.

Booker, a close friend of the senator’s who like Harris is a probable 2020 presidential contender, said she brings much to Washington by virtue of who she is — only the second African American woman ever to serve in the Senate.

“I hear her voice, I see her in private, I see her in caucus, I see her in a lot of the meetings we have behind closed doors, and I’m telling you right now, she brings something powerful and unique to this body,” Booker said.

But Harris is not without her Democratic critics — and many of them focus on her prosecutor past as their concern. The Twitter hashtag “#KamalaHarrisIsACop” is popular among her progressive detractors, who point to her work in law enforcement that they say disproportionately affected people of color.

“Kamala Harris is entitled to no scrutiny, just like every other Democratic politician who is loved by Clinton donors. Also, war is peace,” progressive commentator David Sirota, a one-time congressional staffer for Sanders, tweeted sarcastically in 2017. It came during a time he highlighted her role as California attorney general in the approval of a California hospital merger criticized by nurses and abortion rights activists, as well as misconduct in a crime lab during her tenure as San Francisco district attorney.

Harris seemingly tries to deflect progressive criticism in her new memoir, writing that it’s “a false choice to suggest you must either be for the police or for police accountability.” Given racial disparities in arrest rates that harm “black and brown people,” “egregious” police shootings and outfitting of police departments like “military regiments,” she wrote, “is it any wonder that the very credibility of these public institutions is on the line?”

Harris is the daughter of two immigrants — her mother is from India and her father is from Jamaica — who met at UC Berkeley and fell in love during the height of the civil rights movement. She said a “duty to serve” was nonnegotiable growing up.

The dual importance of the movement and her law enforcement past is evident in her sparsely decorated Senate office. A bust of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, an award, sits on a credenza with a law-enforcement-heavy challenge coin collection. There is a photo of Harris on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., with civil rights great Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. Another picture shows Harris, her husband, Douglas Emhoff, and their two children from Emhoff’s previous marriage marching in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade.

And there’s her prized possession, a photograph of her mother and a close friend as young women on the UC Berkeley campus in the early 1960s. In the background are people wearing black armbands, often a symbol of protest and mourning for ’60s activists. A sign refers to Birmingham, Ala., a focal point of the civil rights movement.

Harris’ mother, a breast cancer researcher, raised her after divorcing her father when Harris was 7. Her mother died in 2009.

“I talk a lot about my mother,” Harris said as she held the picture. “So this is, I think, my favorite thing on this desk.”

This job is not the first time Harris has worked in that very office. In 1984, as a student at Howard University, Harris was an intern for Sen. Alan Cranston, D-Calif., who occupied the same Hart Senate Office Building suite.

She was tasked with answering constituents’ mail. The experience taught her that even as “a lowly student, I could make decisions or work on something that could impact millions of people.”

Harris, however, said she never intended to return to Washington as an officeholder.

“I enjoy being in the executive branch,” she said. “I enjoy being able to make decisions and then roll up my sleeves and just pursue and get stuff done.”

She went to law school and became a prosecutor in the Bay Area, winning election as San Francisco district attorney in 2003. Seven years later, she narrowly won a race for California attorney general.

She had just won a second term when Sen. Barbara Boxer announced in 2015 that she wouldn’t run for re-election the next year. Harris decided that as a senator she could get things done “on a national scale.”

She announced her candidacy and cruised toward victory, expecting to be playing a supporting role to a Hillary Clinton White House — right up until the presidential numbers came in on election night.

“I had a speech that was prepared,” Harris recalled, “and then through the course of the night it became apparent what was happening nationally, and I just went out there and kind of just riffed on what I felt in that moment.”

What Harris ended up telling the stunned crowd at the Exchange LA nightclub in Los Angeles was that when “fundamental values are being attacked ... we fight” — for immigration reform, civil rights, abortion rights and “truth and transparency.”

It didn’t take long for her fighting moments to arrive. She voted against 18 of Trump’s 22 original Cabinet-level nominees, one of the highest “no” rates among Democratic senators. She was one of only 11 Democrats to vote against Kelly for homeland security secretary, presaging a relationship that would become heated before he left the job to become White House chief of staff.

One of their earliest interactions occurred outside of public view, in a small office in the Capitol known as a “hideaway” borrowed from California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein.

Harris said she was talking with Kelly about immigration when it occurred to her to ask, “Have you ever met a ‘Dreamer’?” — young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children who are temporarily protected from deportation under an Obama-era program.

“And he said no,” Harris said. “I asked him if he would be willing to meet with them. … And he said, ‘Well, can I meet with their representative instead?’”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment before Kelly left in December.

Shortly after Harris’ exchange with Kelly, Trump signed his first version of a travel ban barring people from several Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S. Harris recalls sitting on the “rented stools” in the kitchen of her new D.C. apartment that night and fielding calls from immigration lawyers she had worked with as California attorney general.

“Then I said, ‘OK, well, we just got through confirming John Kelly,’ so I say to my team, ‘Get me his number. I need to call him and find out what’s going on.’”

She did call him, at home.

“He’s not too happy,” she said. “Later, I learned I guess that’s just not something that senators normally do.”

The episode inspired her first piece of legislation, to guarantee that anyone detained trying to enter the U.S. would have access to legal counsel. Her first floor speech followed, an address criticizing Trump’s immigration policies that she grounded in the stories of her parents.

Former staffer Sergio Gonzales said Harris often met in her office with young immigrant activists, many of whom were undocumented. Harris would hear their stories, tell them to stay positive and hug them as they cried, he said.

Harris greets supporters at a November 2016 election night rally in Los Angeles. Harris greets supporters at a November 2016 election night rally in Los Angeles. Photo: Chris Carlson / Associated Press 2016 Photo: Chris Carlson / Associated Press 2016 Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Kamala Harris’ prosecutor past could be a 2020 issue. It defines her in the Senate 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

“You don’t always see that” with lawmakers, Gonzales said. “Sometimes it is just politics to them, and they would walk out of the room and not think about it again. And these stories, they stayed with her.”

He added that it was her idea to put up a sign outside their office that reads, “Dreamers are welcome here,” so they knew they had a place in the building to recharge and get support.

In fact, Harris said, it is constituent work that she is most proud of in her time as a senator.

“I don’t believe that the people who elected me elected me to be a pundit on cable news,” Harris said. “They elected me to address their issues, and I take that job very seriously.”

She said she is “enjoying” the Senate — before correcting herself.

“I feel relevant,” she said. “Let’s just say that. I feel a sense of purpose. People ask me all the time, ‘Are you having fun?’ I wouldn’t characterize it that way. But I do feel a sense of purpose.”

Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan