Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Opinion columnist

The Democrats’ primary campaign is in its silly season. That’s not unusual in an open primary, but this time they’re taking it further than usual. Even anti-Trump people are commenting.

As Democratic late-night host Bill Maher noted, the Democrats just need to “come off less crazy than Trump,” but "they’re blowing it.” Says Maher, Democrats are “coming across as unserious people who are going to take away all your money so migrants from Honduras can go to college for free and get a major in 'America sucks.'”

He’s not wrong, as anyone who watched the debaters trying to out-woke each other last week can attest. NeverTrumper Kevin Williamson wrote:

“Somebody must have slipped some psilocybin into the Democrats’ potato salad at this year’s May Day picnic. Open borders? Check! Eviscerating the Bill of Rights? Absolutely, with one of those weird barbed Uncle Henry gut-hook knives! What else? I hope that whichever debate moderator finally presses this crew about the limits of late-term abortion is over 35, because Elizabeth Warren was pretty clearly ready to roll up her sleeves and perform an impromptu D&E right there underneath the Art Deco adornments and heavy brocade curtains of the Fox Theater in beautiful downtown Detroit. “Just a reminder: I’m the Case against Trump guy, the one who described Donald Trump as a half-assed would-be caudillo with a sensibility halfway between Caligula’s and Liberace’s. My anti-Trump credentials are platinum-plated and cryogenically sealed. And I’m telling you: These people are bonkers.”

In the midst of the craziness, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard made a legitimate point

So that’s bad. But even a silly campaign can hit on some serious issues, and last week found one in the face-off between Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Sen. Kamala Harris regarding Harris’ history as a prosecutor.

As Gabbard pointed out, then California attorney general, Harris was responsible for putting "over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana."

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Harris' office also blocked DNA evidence that could have freed a man who may be innocent. And what’s more, as Gabbard said, “She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. And she fought to keep (the) cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”

And that’s not all. As I wrote in these pages over four years ago, Harris defended a faked confession created by a Kern County prosecutor for the purpose of extracting a plea bargain, arguing that forging a confession shouldn’t count as “outrageous” conduct.

Gabbard's criticism makes a wider, more alarming conclusion

It seems that Gabbard is on pretty solid ground with her criticism: Harris’ career as a prosecutor gives the lie to her current woke stance and suggests that she isn’t someone with sympathy for the little guy. That’s a serious, not a silly, criticism. And it must have rattled Harris, since it drew a harsh response, calling Gabbard an apologist for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad — and crueler, mocking her low poll numbers — while Harris’s campaign also bizarrely linked Gabbard to Russia.

But the really serious point to come out is this: If you’re shocked and appalled by Harris’s conduct, don’t try to comfort yourself by thinking it’s unusual (or by blaming Russia.) As Clark Neily writes, “The real significance of Gabbard’s critique, however, lies not in the proposition that Harris was a particularly unprofessional or malign prosecutor, but rather in the fact that she seems to have been a rather ordinary prosecutor who simply did her job the way most prosecutors do. And if that makes a former-prosecutor-turned-presidential-candidate look like a monster, then perhaps that says more about prosecutors in general than it does about Kamala Harris in particular.”

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As I’ve noted elsewhere, prosecutors enjoy enormous and largely unreviewed power in our criminal justice system, especially where defendants are poor and/or unpopular. Kamala Harris’ career is coming under review only because she’s running for the White House; few other prosecutors will face similar scrutiny. If you find her conduct troubling, you need to think about how to address this sort of behavior everywhere, not just in terms of whether to vote for Harris.

Serious enough for you?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of "The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself" is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.