“It is a fact provocative of mirth,” the great H.L. Mencken once wrote, that the enforcement of the Bill of Rights was put “into the hands of lawyers, which is to say into the hands of men specifically educated to discover legal excuses for dishonest, dishonorable and anti-social acts.”

I thought of that after the exchange between Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and California Sen. Kamala Harris in the second Democratic debate last week.

The exchange began when Gabbard brought up Harris’s record during her time as a prosecutor on such issues as the death penalty, bail reform and marijuana.

“Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president,” Gabbard said. “But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”

Harris addressed the attack in the lawyerly way she addresses most attacks: by evading the question and changing the subject.

“I am proud of making a decision to not just give fancy speeches or be in a legislative body and give speeches on the floor but actually doing the work, of being in the position to use the power that I had to reform a system that is badly in need of reform,” she said.

But Gabbard was just getting started.

“The bottom line is, when you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives, you did not and worse yet in the case of those who are on death row, innocent people, you actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would have freed them until you were forced to do so,” she said.

Fighting over the admission of evidence is standard operating procedure for prosecutors. Few prosecutors run for president, however. Another who comes to mind is Rudy Giuliani. But the former New York City mayor does not style himself a progressive.

Harris does. But that’s not accurate, say her California critics. One of them, Loyola law professor Lara Bazelon, wrote a column for the New York Times headlined “Kamala Harris is not a ‘progressive prosecutor.’”

In it Bazelon, the former head of the Innocence Project at Loyola, wrote of Harris’s tenure as San Francisco district attorney from 2004 to 2011:

“Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”

There’s more where that came from, none of it good for Harris. Her campaign’s response didn’t do her much good either.

Instead of defending the senator’s record, Harris’s press secretary tweeted out a link to an article stating that “The Russian propaganda machine that tried to influence the 2016 election is now promoting the presidential aspirations of a controversial Hawaii Democrat.”

Then, after the debate, Harris herself attacked Gabbard for meeting with Bashar al-Assad, the president of war-torn Syria. Inside the Beltway, that might sound like a telling attack. But I suspect that for most voters, this just brings more attention to Gabbard’s No. 1 issue, which is getting the U.S military out of the Mideast.

As a major in the Hawaii National Guard who served in Iraq, she has also attacked Harris on foreign policy, stating in a TV appearance last week, “Kamala Harris is not qualified to serve as commander-in-chief, and I can say this from a personal perspective as a soldier.”

Gabbard’s attacks on Harris are so pointed that you might even think she has a personal dislike for the senator. But perhaps it’s just politics.

Chris Christie didn’t need to have a personal dislike for Marco Rubio back in 2016 when he made a laughingstock of the Florida senator at a GOP primary debate. A lot of people thought Christie did it because he wanted to curry favor with the guy who was leading the field, Donald Trump.

Perhaps Gabbard is doing a favor for the guy who’s leading the Democratic field. Joe Biden had to be happy watching Harris sputter her responses to Gabbard the other night.

If Biden were to get the nomination, Gabbard would make an excellent running mate. Who in that field could speak more authoritatively on foreign policy? Certainly not Biden, who voted for that Iraq War that Gabbard served in.

As for Harris, I suspect this is the beginning of the end of her effort to become a “prosecutor president.”

She needs to work on her defense instead.

ADD - ANOTHER MEDIA HIT JOB:

For some reason the mainstream media are engaged in an effort to portray Gabbard as some kind of a left-wing nut. Or right-wing nut. They can’t make up their mind.

Check the headline on this New York Times hit piece on Gabbard:

It asserts that Gabbard “thinks we’re doomed.” Back when the Times used to observe the rules of journalism, writers and editors did not say what a person “thinks” for the simple reason that no person can know what another person thinks.

You can only know what that person said. And Gabbard did not say she thinks we’re doomed.

Furthermore the writer goes out of her way to paint Gabbard as some sort of fringe candidate because she supports ending U.S. military interventions overseas.

These days most voters feel that way. Donald Trump ran successfully on that platform, and if you’ve watched the Democratic debates you no doubt noticed that most of the candidates have argued Trump is not getting out fast enough.

Also note some of the experts portrayed as fringe characters by the writer. One is Stephen Kinzer, who offers the view that the so-called “White Helmets” in Syria are actually on the same side as Al Qaeda. (Read Pat Lang on that.) That’s been reported by top journalists such as Sy Hersh, formerly of the Times.

Kinzer is also formerly of the Times. He’s got a couple of decades reporting from places like Central America and Eastern Europe. The author leaves out that key fact, however.

No wonder so many people prefer the Russian-backed media.

They do better reporting.