Saunders: Harris’ stunts rewarded

Instead, Harris said she would attend an alternative event at a Columbia, S.C., venue and skip the forum at the historically black college.

This is how the only candidate to graduate from a historically black college treated her own team to further her ambition. It didn’t matter that the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center gave her the same award in 2016. (The “20/20” part, by the way, refers to the group’s founders, 20 black Democrats and 20 black Republicans.)

In this shameless election year, Harris was rewarded for her small-minded stunt.

After Trump accepted the award and addressed a cherry-picked audience with barely any Benedict College students, the college took control of the event away from the 20/20 group that invited Trump.

After successfully intimidating reformers who wanted to recognize Trump’s achievement, Harris deigned to participate in the event.

Yes, as a publicity-seeking businessman and presidential candidate, Trump’s rhetoric on crime and punishment was harsh. Notably, Trump supported the death penalty for the “Central Park Five” — five black and Hispanic youths who were convicted of raping a Central Park jogger but whose convictions were overturned.

There’s no denying that Trump’s dialogue is frequently racially insensitive. Nonetheless, Trump’s record on reforming a war-on-drugs sentencing system that overincarcerated African-Americans is an amazing achievement. Trump prodded Republicans to join Democrats to pass the First Step Act — in both the GOP-led Senate and the House — last year. The measure, which Trump signed in December, led to the early release of some 3,100 inmates from federal custody, The New York Times reported in July.

That’s Trump’s record. It’s not shabby.

News reports described Trump’s Benedict College speech as a campaign-like event.But the event also gave a platform to former federal inmates, including Alice Marie Johnson, whose sentence Trump commuted, and Jerome Brown, who is now a master barber. By Harris’ logic, I suppose, they, too, should have boycotted the event.

Jon Ponder, a former bank robber who founded Hope for Prisoners in Las Vegas, worked with the White House on the First Step Act. “I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Ponder told me. “When I had conversations inside the White House early on, they were talking about all the right things.”

He added: “I have not heard one inmate say, ‘I want a Democrat or a Republican,’ because they don’t care about partisan politics. All they care about is if you care about prison reform or prison reentry.”

Harris certainly cares. She has put herself at the head of the pack of Democrats who shame reformers for putting positive change before faceless gridlock. She could have showed up at Benedict College the day after Trump’s speech and hit the bombastic executive for things he has said and done. Instead, she chose to punish like-minded people who chose to applaud his work to combat overincarceration. How dare they!

Debra J. Saunders is a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist. dsaunders@reviewjournal.com; Twitter.com/DebraJSaunders