Reforming bail sounds like a good idea. I don't know why anyone would trust Harris on the issue, though.
If she wanted to shrink jails when she was California's Attorney General, she could have respected court orders requiring prisoners to be released.
Likewise, she could have stopped "defending convictions obtained by local prosecutors who inserted a false confession into the transcript of a police interrogation, lied under oath and withheld crucial evidence from the defense."
This is both interesting and unrelated to the bill.
There is not an issue on this planet, down to "is it raining outside," on which I would trust Rand Paul. But I don't have to trust him when I can read the thing. It's only eighteen pages long. (On my phone, otherwise I'd link it.) Beyond that, there are plenty of organizations more than willing to weigh in on stuff like this; you don't have to take the legislator's word on it at all.
As a non-lawyer, I'd expect to miss something important from the legislative text.
Your point about relying on other organizations is a good one, though. I generally take this approach, but I wasn't expecting anything to have been published yet on such a new bill. It looks like the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and SPLC all issued positive press releases, though.
You're not arguing with the legislation she cowrote but with a detail from her history. You need to address the argument here, because it stands independent of her history.
If she wanted to shrink jails when she was California's Attorney General, she could have respected court orders requiring prisoners to be released.
Likewise, she could have stopped "defending convictions obtained by local prosecutors who inserted a false confession into the transcript of a police interrogation, lied under oath and withheld crucial evidence from the defense."
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/kamala-harris-a-...