Kamala Harris’s protégée, far-left Rep. Lateefah Simon (D., Calif.), will deliver the progressive response to President Donald Trump’s congressional address on behalf of the Working Families Party next week. Simon, a defund the police advocate and so-called rising star in the Democratic Party, praised Harris after the former vice president swore her into office last month.
The announcement solidifies Simon’s position within the ranks of some of the most far-left House Democrats. Reps. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), both “Squad” members, are among the progressives who have delivered State of the Union responses for the Working Families Party. And Simon’s close ties to Harris could serve as a thorn for the former vice president—who attempted to pivot closer to the center during her short-lived presidential run last year—as Harris reportedly weighs a 2026 bid for California’s governor’s mansion.
“I’m honored to speak on behalf of the Working Families Party,” Simon said in a statement. “We need a government that is run by and for working people, not billionaires—and that’s what the WFP is fighting for.”
Over the course of some 20 years, Harris has pushed Simon to finish college, given her a government job, introduced her to her late husband, officiated their wedding, and eulogized him at his funeral. She also campaigned for Simon’s successful 2016 race to join the board of directors for the Bay Area’s crime-ridden BART public train system. Simon went on to try to defund BART’s police force by $2 million.
And after Harris swore Simon into office last month, the Oakland congresswoman said she was “honored to have my mentor and former boss, Vice President Kamala Harris,” who “has played an integral role in shaping my public service career.”
When tacking to the center during her presidential bid, Harris distanced herself from Simon, at least publicly. Unlike other prominent Democrats, Harris didn’t endorse Simon’s congressional bid last year. Simon, however, continued to gush over the former vice president. She praised Harris in a speech on the third night of last year’s Democratic National Convention, though it was early in the night, before primetime. Earlier in the summer, she said Harris “is auntie status, she is mentor status.”
Harris was likely trying to keep Simon’s far-left positions at arm’s length as she tried to appeal to a wider voter base ahead of the 2024 presidential election. At the time, the then-candidate was billing herself as a “tough” and “fearless” prosecutor, even though she had supported slashing police budgets, ending cash bail, and eliminating “mass incarceration” in 2020. Simon, meanwhile, remained a fierce advocate for progressive criminal justice policies.
It’s unclear how Harris, who has not yet stated she will run for California governor even as polls show her as leading a potential race, would alter her presidential platform to win over the largely liberal state electorate.
Simon spent years working for wealthy progressives who pushed far-left criminal justice policies. From 2016 to 2022, she headed the Oakland-based Akonadi Foundation, a nonprofit founded by prominent liberal donors, where she funneled more than $2 million to Bay Area anti-police and anti-prison projects in 2020 alone. Over three years, Simon, through Akonadi, sent $130,000 to the police-abolitionist organization Anti Police-Terror Project. She then led the donor-advised fund of Netflix chairman Reed Hastings’s wife, Patty Quillin, a prominent anti-police donor who gave $1.5 million to George Gascón when he first ran for Los Angeles district attorney.
Earlier in her career, Simon served as the program director of the left-wing Rosenberg Foundation, which teamed up with George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and California progressives to push a successful 2014 voter ballot initiative that decriminalized retail theft and drug-dealing. The state attorney general’s office, which Harris was leading at the time, wrote on the ballot that the measure would send hundreds of millions in “criminal justice system savings” into school truancy prevention, addiction treatment, and victim help.
But even in deep-blue California, the progressive criminal justice causes that have long defined Simon’s and Harris’s political mores are increasingly unpopular. In November, Californians overwhelmingly voted to gut the 2014 measure, which prosecutors blamed for the state’s rampant drug, homelessness, and crime problems.
Also in November, two Soros-backed district attorneys with ties to Harris and Simon were given the boot. Heavily Democratic Los Angeles ousted Gascón, the progressive district attorney whom Harris once praised as a “proven leader of national significance.” Gascón had, years earlier, succeeded Harris as San Francisco’s top cop. Soon after he was elected as Los Angeles’s district attorney, residents grew tired of his lax policies, which included ending cash bail and releasing violent offenders back to the streets.
Meanwhile, Oakland’s own Soros-backed district attorney, Pamela Price, was recalled after just two years in office with 63 percent of the vote. She had roused public outcry for slashing sentences of convicted murderers and refusing to charge minors as adults, even for homicide.
Simon had backed and defended Price. In turn, Price praised Simon as a “dynamic warrior for justice.”
Update 6:10 p.m.: This piece has been updated to clarify that Donald Trump is delivering a joint address to Congress.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
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