Will Kamala Harris Hold The Powerful Accountable?

If Kamala Harris is elected president, how might she hold the powerful accountable? Here’s a look at her record on monopolies and financial power, and what it suggests for her future.

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In 2010, Kamala Harris went to Google headquarters and gave an hourlong interview with David Drummond, the then-chief legal officer who had overseen the YouTube, Android, and DoubleClick acquisitions. Drummond resigned 10 years later in disgrace over a sex scandal, but back then, he was the legal eagle moving Google through its first existential political crisis. The company was being investigated for monopolization, a suit it avoided through connections with Obama and the GOP establishment.

Harris, meanwhile, was running for California attorney general, a race she narrowly won, with the support of progressives. So her stop at Google had a different valence than it would today, as it was a campaign stop for an in-state race. Still, she was asked about antitrust, and today she has a very good chance to be president, so her answer is worth considering.

Drummond prefaced his question with the statement that Google was not a monopoly and was constantly being challenged by entrepreneurs in garages. Then he asked, “How do you think about enforcing antitrust?” Harris’ response was noncommittal. Harris said that it’s important to let businesses “develop and grow” because tech is a “very significant source of California’s economy.” That said, enforcement against bad actors wasn’t necessarily anti-business. “Bad businesses are not good for good businesses,” she added.

Harris didn’t articulate particularly coherent views on antitrust, which is consistent with the broader Democratic Party consensus at the time. Despite Google being in the crosshairs of the Obama-era Federal Trade Commission, antitrust just wasn’t widely considered important. The people in the audience asking her questions, all Google employees, certainly didn’t have strong views on the problem. Plus, at this public event, Harris wanted to connect to these people not as Google employees, but as California voters. Her message was, “I like you, give me money and votes.” And she achieved her goal.

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Barack Obama and Bill Clinton both would have had a different answer, because both strongly valued consolidated financial power, as Atari Democrats or New Democrats close with men like Larry Summers and Robert Rubin. Joe Biden too would have had a different response, because he resented Silicon Valley executives. But not Harris. She didn’t have strong views and sought to put forward the most Democratic normie position possible, which in this case was to not take one.

With Harris as the next Democratic nominee for president, it’s important to ask the question: What would Harris do about corporate power as president? This post isn’t about whether Harris will win, whether she should win, or anything else political. You can get that elsewhere. I am purely interested in what she would do about monopoly power if she becomes president. And as I’ve looked into her track record, that theme — she’s a Democratic normie on policy surrounded by Silicon Valley-friendly Obama types — is what I’ve seen, over and over, for better or for ill.

Not Beholden To Big Pharma

I first noticed Harris in 2010, and was initially excited about her as a political leader. But as I saw her in action, operating consistent with the Obama administration on big banks, which I’ll get to, I quickly soured on her, and developed a negative perception of how she operates. When Biden picked her as vice president, I was not happy. And when he won the election, a very well-placed Big Tech operative told me that Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Google were over the moon, because they had their woman in the White House and could tamp down on the enthusiasm to address consolidation. But Harris didn’t actually block any Biden actions on Big Tech or antitrust.

Instead she acted, as she had in 2010, as a Democratic normie, going along with the (new) consensus in the party that big business and private equity is too powerful. And that meant accepting a relatively aggressive regime, with antitrust suits against Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, seed companies, and Ticketmaster, as well as a robust attempt to address consolidation more broadly, bans on noncompete agreements, cutting the price of inhalers and epipen-style devices, pro-labor organizing policy, attacks on junk fees, modest airline regulation, actions to limit private equity in health care, and a White House council to promote competition across government. Indeed, Biden took Trump’s promise of populism and actually implemented it, with Harris by his side.

Still, Wall Street is happy about her ascension, and thinks she’ll break with this framework. “Among those expected to aid Harris’ bid for the nomination,” wrote Semafor’s Liz Hoffman, “are Centerview’s Blair Effron, Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray, Lazard’s Peter Orszag and Ray McGuire, Paul Weiss’ Brad Karp, and Evercore’s Roger Altman.” 

These are the core institutional actors who want more mergers and acquisitions. Jeff Sonnenfeld, a Yale management professor who organizes retreats for big business leaders and is hostile to the current antitrust enforcement regime, said CEOs “are exhilarated over this choice.”

And CNBC’s Jim Cramer, who represents a certain consensus on Wall Street, thinks that a President Harris will fire Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, because Harris is a big fan and booster of Big Tech. Harris’ close adviser, he says, is her brother-in-law, former Obama Justice Department official and current Uber general counsel Tony West, who is now traveling with her as a candidate. 

“She’s better for the stock market, she likes megacap Big Tech,” Cramer said. “She’s not the enemy of the West Coast, she’s from the West Coast.” Cramer said the contest is now between the “‘nativists’ of Trump/Vance and the pro-tech globalist team of Harris and whoever she picks.”

So where does this vision of Harris as a pro-monopolist globalist come from? Unlike Vance, who is explicit in his antimonopoly and pro-nationalist vision, Harris is something of a political cipher, lacking a clear set of articulated views or philosophy. The answer is in her track record and her social network. In fact, Kamala Harris has been an antitrust and white-collar criminal enforcer, back when she was the attorney general of California. And how she operated then has some suggestive breadcrumbs of how she thinks.

Take, for instance, health care consolidation. There are only a few government places outside of the federal government with the capacity to truly wage independent litigation against powerful dominant corporations, and the California Attorney General’s office, with a lot of lawyers on staff, is one of them. Most state attorney general offices have a few lawyers, if they are lucky, that do consumer protection and antitrust, let alone other forms of complex financial litigation. California, New York, Texas, and Illinois are some of the few states that can pull the trigger on difficult, complicated stuff.

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And on health care, she did some good, if very normal for a Democrat, work. In 2012, Harris’ office issued subpoenas to large hospital systems in California, which ultimately turned into somewhat successful litigation by her successor against hospital giant Sutter Health. She joined the Obama administration to challenge the Anthem-Cigna merger and went along with other state enforcers in litigation against product hopping for opioid treatment Suboxone, as well as pay-for-delay in pharmaceuticals. 

Product hopping and pay-for-delay are terms that describe different techniques where pharmaceutical firms extend their patents unlawfully and thus increase prices of drugs. (As a candidate in 2020, she endorsed a policy called march-in rights, which would undercut pharmaceutical patents.)

That said, it’s not obvious what Harris herself did, though at the very least she did let these cases and investigations go forward. Such a role isn’t unusual for a political leader. Xavier Becerra, her successor as California attorney general, had an equally good track record, but when he became the head of the Health and Human Services, the department that runs Medicare, it was obvious he didn’t understand basic details of the systems he oversaw. Becerra had let the staff run things.

Still, the pay-for-delay stuff means Harris is a Democrat who is not particularly beholden to Big Pharma and who sees value in addressing drug pricing. The California Attorney General Office has some real lawyers who have been innovative. At the time, there wasn’t a great playbook for taking on pharma sitting around, so trying that stuff is as good as can be expected.

Backing Down On Foreclosure Fraud

And yet, there is another strand of her policy framework, one that is much more powerful. While California attorney general, Harris had her most important test as an executive presiding over a big political economy decision — whether to crack down on the Too Big to Fail banks that crashed the economy, or whether to allow those banks to continue mass foreclosures.

In 2009-2010, the Obama administration had decided to put the whole burden of the financial crisis on homeowners. But Harris pledged to operate differently, to take on the banks and get something genuinely meaningful for homeowners for a mass legal violation called foreclosure fraud, where large banks had done critical paperwork incorrectly when securitizing the loans of millions of homes, and so could not legally engage in mass foreclosures during the crisis. If you want the details, read Dave Dayen’s Chain of Title. But at the time, I was excited to see someone stand up on this core issue. In 2010, Harris actually talked about it while campaigning at Google’s headquarters.

Only Harris, as a normie Democrat would, ended up going along with the Obama framework. She signed a foreclosure fraud settlement with a seemingly big number attached, but one that didn’t do very much for homeowners. As a result, a lot of people lost their homes who shouldn’t have. That was a tragedy. Then, when she was running for president in 2020, she bragged about what she did.

Later it came out that her staff had given her memos on how she should have prosecuted OneWest bank, which was owned by eventual Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, but she just chose not to. 

The best that can be said about these choices is that none of these decisions are out of line with what most Democratic officials did at the time. (There’s a small caveat, which is that part of the settlement involved a foreclosure monitor, and Harris elevated law professor Katie Porter to that position. Through superhuman effort, Porter made a small dent in the problem).

Friends And Family In Big Tech

I didn’t pay as much attention to her Big Tech work as attorney general, but she was close to a whole slew of people in the industry, top executives at Google and Facebook. She was attorney general when these companies cemented their dominance in America, Harris’ office saw Facebook as “a good actor.” 

She took no actions against big firms, failed to back privacy legislation, and even started a privacy-related “monthly working group that included representatives from Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Kleiner Perkins. In internal documents, Harris’ office referred to the companies as “partners.”

Her circle of friends and family suggest a cultural affinity for large tech corporations and the revolving door of Obama alums who circled into them. In addition to her brother-in-law Tony West, her niece worked at Uber, Slack, and Facebook, and her husband was a big law partner at Venable and DLA Piper, with large corporate clients. One of her close informal advisers is former Obama White House official Karen Dunn, who is the lead lawyer for Google against the Biden administration’s antitrust case in adtech and who helped prep Jeff Bezos in his testimony to Congress during the Big Tech investigation. Her other clients include Apple, Uber, and Qualcomm.

Another ally is Neera Tanden, who is generally hostile to addressing corporate concentration. And Harris’ campaign is reportedly trying to recruit Obama veteran and former Uber executive David Plouffe to run the campaign. Aside from his work for Uber, Plouffe was in charge of policy for Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation. And apparently, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder is going to be vetting vice presidential candidates.

That said, she has on occasion taken the other side. She’s supported the unionization of Google workers, and as senator, she prominently grilled Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 when he testified over privacy and Cambridge Analytica.

As vice president, Harris has largely been absent from most policy areas I follow, so I don’t know how to think about her views on Biden’s economic agenda. But she hasn’t been totally absent, tweeting about cutting overdraft fees, rental junk fees, and junk fees. Generally speaking, however, tweets are far less important than what someone says in public. And she has spoken about banning noncompete agreements.

That said, Harris hasn’t talked about antitrust at all, as far as I can tell. And worryingly, where there is live policy at work, she has emphasized the “AI safety” frame with commerce secretary and Big Tech booster Gina Raimondo, which can be a way to advance pro-consolidation regulatory schemes. All in all, Harris does not seem to be a player in any of the big money areas.

Does her track record really matter? One way is to read her as not that different from Biden’s pre-presidential track record. As a senator, Biden did whatever the credit card companies wanted, was in on monopoly-friendly deals, and he was vice president when Obama mishandled the financial crisis. As president, he delegated and ignored most domestic policy, and so some of it went to populists and union people while most of it went to neoliberals like Janet Yellen and Neera Tanden. The net result of Biden’s choices is a mix; good policy in a few areas, and incompetence across a host of them, as well as poor messaging.

But Biden always had a tinge of populism. In the 1990s, he went after Stephen Breyer as an elitist in his hearing for the Supreme Court. Biden was a foreign policy guy, and never liked the Silicon Valley and Wall Street execs; he always thought they looked down on him.

Harris is more corporate-friendly by culture and instinct, though at the White House, she didn’t go out of her way to help Big Tech. Whether that’s a result of positioning, competence, or ideology, she has not been the boon that Silicon Valley expected. Her role as the head of the border problem is not promising in terms of Harris’ ability to execute, though Biden ultimately bears responsibility for his administration. I’m told she’s generally a fan of the Service Employees International Union labor union and wants to focus on health care, which is consistent with where a lot of Democrats are. 

There’s also a lot of inertia here; it’s not like she can change everything on a dime even if she wanted. She will inherit Biden’s legacy and officeholders, and she hasn’t done much as vice president to thwart economic policy, for good or ill. She also has to run on it.

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Two Scenarios For The Future

So how would she be as president? I’ll offer a pessimistic and optimistic scenario.

The pessimistic scenario is that Jim Cramer is right, and Harris is indeed a corporatist president who fires anti-monopolists in the administration. She’d mostly be uninterested in our areas and will delegate them to advisers who are hostile to our aims, with a nod to factions in Congress and the media who will be noisy if she’s too beholden to dominant corporations. 

I could see things like weak settlements on the Google cases, appointing a corporate-friendly Democrat to the Federal Trade Commission as the fifth commissioner to neuter Lina Khan, or pushing weak privacy legislation that overwrites antitrust law. A Harris-appointed attorney general could intervene in antitrust suits, push out Jonathan Kanter entirely, and prioritize a pro-monopoly vision under the guise of national security.

There would probably still be modest support for work in health care and traditional consumer protection, and labor organizing in certain parts of the economy, which Harris would use to thwart protests by progressives like Elizabeth Warren. 

I suspect that pharmacy benefit managers are in trouble regardless, the momentum there in Congress is too strong, and Harris could be supportive of eliminating noncompete agreements and addressing junk fees, though the people she’d put in charge wouldn’t be good at executing on corporate-power stuff. 

If Harris takes the Jim Cramer direction, what is likely to result is anger from progressives and populists, an expansion of the popular faction against monopoly power, more public organizing, and a turn to the states for help as the federal government weakens its broader response.

The optimistic scenario is that Harris is a normie Democrat, and there is enough consensus among Democratic policymakers that she continues and expands what Biden has done on market power to avoid annoying certain people in Congress and to build out an alliance with labor unions. 

In that case, there is an expansion of the antimonopoly framework, but mostly the antimonopoly regulators keep doing what they are doing, without pushback from the White House. It’ll look a lot like what a second Biden term would have been, with the solidifying of the frameworks the new thinkers in antitrust have put in place.

If you had to force me to bet, I’d probably be more pessimistic than not on what a President Harris will do. I could be wrong — I was wrong about Pete Buttigieg, who grew and evolved on the job and is now confident in levying penalties against airlines and actually governing. There’s huge risk for Harris if she does actually run away from the populist parts of the Biden administration.

The monopolists are trying to argue that antitrust enforcers are hostile to Big Tech, as if that’s the fulcrum of dispute. But the truth is, Big Tech is a small part of the overall agenda, the idea is to roll back financialization and consolidation more broadly, and allow working people to control the fruits of their labor. That’s what voters of every stripe want. 

As an example, the Federal Trade Commission today just started an investigation on surveillance pricing, the kind of ticky-tack surge-pricing nonsense we’re seeing everywhere that people hate. And it was supported by both Republicans and Democrats on the commission.

In other words, going after, say, Ticketmaster, is popular, as is reigning in the corporate profiteering happening throughout the economy in rent, meat, adtech, seeds, and chemicals, health care, and so forth. Trump promised populism, but Biden actually delivered some of it. If Harris abandons the work, with J.D. Vance on the Republican side, antimonopoly policy will be ceded to the conservatives, who may run as the party of working people and build a durable governing majority for a generation.

All that being said, regardless of who is in charge and what they believe, I just don’t see wholesale backsliding to an Obama-era style of competition regulation. There has been real institutionalization of the work Biden anti-monopolists have done, with new rules on airlines, shipping, junk fees, credit cards, hearing aids, pharmaceuticals, data, and an expectation that antitrust is a real area of law. 

People have come to expect some action on these questions. It would be hard to just drop the variety of antitrust suits federal enforcers have brought, and most such cases have state attorneys general on board who could continue them regardless. Moreover, if there is backsliding, big business is going to explode with consolidation and various forms of price manipulation, leading to a broad popular cry of “do something” and anger at feckless political leaders.

On a basic level, most Democratic normies hate Ticketmaster. Actually, everyone hates Ticketmaster. Hopefully, Kamala Harris will see the value in that, or will at least understand that anti-monopolism is glue for part of the Democratic coalition. I suspect it would be hard for anyone to not get that populism works, especially for someone who is about to hit the campaign trail and defend the last three and a half years of policymaking. Then again, she is surrounded by a lot of people who don’t think that. 

So it’s hard to know what will win out in the short-term: political reality or the desire of a faction of wealthy Democrats to return to the anti-populist time of Obama. In the long-term, of course, we know the answer. It’s just a question of who governs.

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