VP Harris Should Start a New Authority to Defend Local Autonomy
This column is co-published with Zócalo Public Square. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr, 2019, CC 2.0
MEMO
To: Vice President Kamala D. Harris
Re: Your Next Gig
Please don’t run for governor in 2026. And don’t bother running for president again in 2028.
Because there’s a job that’s more important right now, for your state and your country, than either of those posts.
It’s a job that doesn’t yet exist, but California needs it if we’re going to survive this authoritarian moment. And it’s a job that would fit you even better than the bespoke Chloé power suits you wore during last year’s campaign.
Madam Vice President, I write to publicly propose that you step forward to establish the California Autonomy Authority, and serve as its founding director. You have the stature to convince the legislature and governor to create such authority, which could be structured as an independent commission, or be located within the executive branch.
California needs a new agency with broad powers—including to compel testimony, subpoena records, and respond to emergencies—to defend itself against the new and existential threat of a lawless and authoritarian American nation-state.
The Trump regime has effectively declared war against our people, our cities, our governments, and our democracy, demanding that we obey their dictates instead of our own laws. They’ve dispatched thousands of secret police to seize Californians off the streets, deployed troops to back up the secret police, cancelled our environmental laws, dangerously released our water, and illegally moved to cut off funding for emergency recovery and vital programs.
While these occupiers of the U.S. government attack us constantly, we Californians have no full-time body to defend ourselves, and our state’s democracy, in this war. Instead, our officials are forced to split their attention between governing their own jurisdictions and defending against federal attacks.
That lack of focus has cost us, and put us on defense. In Los Angeles, the federal secret police set up shop and started arresting people, with local leadership, preoccupied with fire rebuilding and Hollywood’s woes, reacting slowly.
Our governor, Gavin Newsom, has struggled to reconcile the monumental job of managing California’s crises of housing, homelessness, and climate—all of which require federal cooperation to mitigate—with the new full-time job of fighting against the federal invasion. His shifting public stances (He’s fighting Trump! He’s reaching out to Trump!) and his pursuit of the presidency are distracting, and sow cynicism rather than trust. Attorney General Rob Bonta is a similar bind, juggling constant litigation against the U.S. with his full-time job as the state’s top law enforcement official.
We need our public officials to focus on their actual jobs. And we also need someone else to take charge of defending California and protecting our autonomy and power to govern ourselves against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Your whole career has prepared you for this urgent assignment. Your deep experience in local law enforcement—as a line prosecutor and San Francisco district attorney—will be vital to the task of getting local governments, especially local police, to collaborate in defense against Trump.
Your six years as California attorney general, representing the entirety of the state government, gave insight into the full range of legal and governance vulnerabilities that the Trump people might exploit.
Your four years in the White House, as an active vice president, taught you how intelligence, agencies, the military, and the U.S. government respond in crises—all lessons that can be applied now in defense of California. We will need allies in other states and other countries to defend ourselves against Trump, and you have databases full of contacts across this country (from your presidential campaign) and in world capitals (from your extensive travels as vp).
Your combination of public service experiences would make you perfect for the varied dutie of this novel role.
For starters, you’re a crime-fighter, and this is a crime-fighting job. The new authority needs the power to subpoena and prosecute. Donald Trump is a convicted felon who is breaking the law and violating the constitution in office, and his administration, which embraces corruption, has likely been infiltrated by criminals or their enterprises. You should investigate, expose, and help prosecute such criminality—because the Trump-controlled U.S. Department of Justice won’t. You also could take action that local police won’t—by identifying and arresting the masked federal agents assaulting or kidnapping Californians.
In the process, your authority would create a record of the U.S. regime’s crimes that would provide a foundation for future federal or international prosecutions, or even a truth-and-reconciliation commission.
The job also would involve policy-making. You would determine which laws or governing structures offer California and its local governments the most protection against federal attack. Your mission here would be protecting—and extending—California’s autonomy so that the federal government can’t cancel education funding or rail projects, and can’t dictate what our universities teach, or the kind of medicine our hospitals might dispense. To do that, you might end up creating new agencies in California, and possibly other allied states, to replace the federal departments Trump is dismantling.
To do this job right, you mut commit long-term. You term as authority director should be at least five years. You can serve as the bridge between the current governor, who leaves office at the end of 2026, and the next governor, thus discouraging the Trump administration from trying to exploit that transfer of power. And since your term would go to 2030, two years beyond the 2028 presidential election, you’d make clear to MAGA Republicans and feckless Democrats alike that California won’t stop defending its autonomy even after Trump is gone.
Yes, I know that taking this new gig would mean taking yourself out of the races for governor or president. But what would you really be giving up? While you’d be the favorite in the governor’s race, it would be a tough campaign. Your own donors are unenthusiastic, and polls show California voters are at best lukewarm about you. And the Trump people are already busy making sure the 2028 presidential election won’t be free or fair. (Betting markets actually give Trump better odds of winning an unconstitutional third term than of any Democrat winning the election.)
So please don’t sit at home in Brentwood debating between running to serve the state (in two years) or the nation (in four). Instead, stand up right now, and create and lead a new authority to serve both.
