dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Activists Question Sen. Kamala Harris’s Silence on Sex-Trafficking Bill, Despite Previous Crusade Against Backpage.com

Harris has collected $71,500 donations from Google, which opposes the bill

BY: Susan Crabtree, Washington Free Beacon, 10/16/17

Despite Sen. Kamala Harris’s crusade against outlets that allow advertisements for underage trafficking, the California Democrat has resisted publicly commenting or signing onto bipartisan legislation that would allow families of victims and states to sue Backpage.com and other websites.

Harris, while serving as California’s attorney general, condemned Backpage.com as “the world’s top online brothel” in 2016, bringing pimping and other charges against the website, which she and other lawmakers have accused of knowingly facilitating child sex trafficking.

Harris made fighting sex-trafficking one of her signature issues during her campaign for Senate last year, and she has long targeted Backpage.com as a main culprit. She signed a letter with 46 other state attorneys general in 2013 calling on Congress to give states the ability to sue Backpage.com and any other websites that allegedly knowingly advertised for and profited from the sex trafficking.

However, Harris’s bid to “be a power broker has her walking a delicate political tightrope” on the sex-trafficking issue and a bill to combat it, McClatchy recently reported.

The bill, known as the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), would bring about some of the very changes to the law Harris asked Congress to impose when she was attorney general.

The bipartisan legislation, authored by Sens. Rob Portman, (R., Ohio) and Richard Blumenthal, (D., Conn.) has 34 senate cosponsors across the political spectrum, including 11 Democrats.

Those formally backing the bill include GOP Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah on the right, and Democratic Sens. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois on the left.

Harris, on the other hand, has yet to announce support for, or opposition to, the bill.

“Anyone who has her visibility on an issue such as Backpage.com and is not signed onto the bill—people are just puzzled, and it doesn’t look good for her,” Lisa Thompson, vice president of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, told the Washington Free Beacon.

Other activists and backers of the bill say Harris is having a hard time squaring her prior crusade against Backpage.com with her job representing Google, Facebook and other powerful Silicon Valley forces as a senator from California. Google, Facebook, and other sites are vehemently against the Portman-Blumenthal bill and another version wending its way through the House.

“Harris has a bit of a split personality,” said Jamie Court, president of the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog. “She really was a dogged advocate for these families of victims when she was attorney general.”

It is easy to go after the owners of Backpage.com, whom Court described as three millionaires who have profited from “despicable acts on the Internet.”

“It’s a whole different thing to go up against a company that you can’t avoid on the Internet who also are formidable Democratic donors whose politics, other than this, probably largely match your own,” he said.

A Free Beacon analysis of Federal Election Commission fundraising records for Harris’s Senate race, found a total of $71,500 in donations from 54 different employees of either Google, or its parent company, Alphabet, Inc.

The donations include five from top Alphabet Inc. executives, including Eric Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman.

Harris received a total of $213,341 from the tech sector, ranking her No. 4 in highest donations after only Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, (D., N.Y.), according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/activists-question-sen-kamala-harriss-silence-on-sex-trafficking-bill-despite-previous-crusade-against-backpage-com/