Dhillon ‘89 Seeks California State Office

By William D. Aubin | Tuesday, October 21, 2008

A candidate for California State Assembly who is both a woman and a minority is not an unusual phenomenon, especially when she is running to represent the thirteenth District of the state, an area that includes portions of San Francisco, a city that idolizes diversity. It is also not peculiar that the woman, Harmeet Dhillon, is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. What is extraordinary about this San Franciscan candidate is her party affiliation: Dhillon is a proud Republican.

Nothing about Harmeet Dhillon’s life is particularly ordinary. Hers was the only Sikh family in the rural North Carolina town she grew up in. When Dhillon and her family immigrated to the United States from Punjab, India, they were greeted into her new American hometown with a sign that read “The Ku Klux Klan Welcomes You to Smithfield, North Carolina.” When she came to Hanover to attend Dartmouth, Dhillon found herself similarly out of place. Gone were the “Yes sir” and “No ma’am” she had grown up with both in Punjab and North Carolina. Instead, she says, “When I went to Dartmouth, we had this very different liberal, liberation theology. There was a Sandinista-loving attitude among the professors and among the students. Being old fashioned, I was not used to guys opening the doors for themselves and letting it slam shut in front of the woman who was walking right behind them.” She was so struck by “the bad manners the Yankees had” that Dhillon wrote her first letter to the editor of The Review on the subject. By her senior year, she would herself become editor of The Dartmouth Review.

It is with this record of standing out in her community that Dhillon launched a campaign to represent the thirteenth District in the California State Assembly as a Republican. The California State Assembly is the equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives on a state-wide level. She acknowledges that her district “may be the toughest district in the country” for a Republican to win. In fact, Dhillon is not only running with the Republican name, but as a professed supporter of most of the basic tenets of conservative and libertarian thought.

“I am focusing on the traditional issues that an average Republican candidate around the country would, i.e. lower taxes, less government regulation, less interference by the government in your life,” she told The Review. “I’m a big member of the NRA, and that’s in my platform.”

Dhillon has tied most of the success of her campaign to the hope that cooler heads will prevail among the Democratic constituents she hopes to represent. She describes Tom Ammiano, her Democratic opponent, as “one of the most singularly one-sided, almost caricature-like liberal politicians, who holds views that are simply out of touch with your average mainstream Democrat.”

Asked about the issues that Dhillon could use to attract Democratic voters, her first example was the sanctuary city policy of San Francisco:

Some of the issues that I think are going to resonate with Democratic and Republican voters in this election, and an issue that my opponent is quite weak on, is giving sanctuary by our city to juvenile illegal aliens who commit crimes. That’s become quite a controversial issue in San Francisco because there have been several of these violent crimes, and the city’s policy has been not to turn them over to INS or the ICE, but rather to fly them back to their home countries at public expense, or to harbor them in safe houses in other counties while taking federal funding for border patrol enforcement and generally being extremely hypocritical about these things. The result of these policies is that people have been murdered. In San Francisco in June, a family of three, a father and two sons, were shot dead by a sanctuary city criminal with an AK-47. The city had numerous opportunities to turn him over to the police, and they didn’t do that.

As someone whose family had to take an oath to abide by the laws of the United States, Dhillon is outraged that her opponent “has flagrantly and publicly said that he will not uphold the immigration laws of the United States, and he publicly continues to defend these sanctuary city policies that unleash criminals on our streets.” She believes that after she gets this message out to voters, even most Democrats will have to say, with Dhillon, “Sometimes, enough is enough, and that [Ammiano’s position] doesn’t make much sense”.

Another major area of California policy that desperately needs a common sense approach is the budget. The budget for the state of California took a record amount of time to approve, and there are still rumblings from Sacramento that point to further deliberation and possibly reconsideration. Dhillon is adamant about the need for serious reform in the way the people’s money is spent.

“We need to have spending caps,” she says, “which we don’t have. We need to give the governor the right to decouple spending from the automatic increases that have been passed in prior laws. The majority of the budget right now can’t be touched. The majority of the budget is already fixed by prior laws, which makes it impossible for a governor or the legislature to change with the circumstances.” If this situation sounds familiar even to readers outside the Golden State, it is because of the similar situation in which the federal government finds itself, albeit on a much larger scale. One hopes that the reforms Dhillon seeks in California will be implemented with great haste and borrowed by Congress even faster.

Harmeet Dhillon came to Dartmouth College and to The Dartmouth Review during a particularly tumultuous period for both institutions: the middle of the 1980s. The two events that stand out in particular are the construction and destruction of the shantytown on the green in 1986 and the incompetent and eventually violent behavior of the soon departed Professor William Cole in 1988. Both episodes involved a campus dialogue drenched in accusations and assumptions of racism and bigotry of the highest order, mostly leveled at students then on the staff of The Review.

In this environment of heightened sensitivity, Dhillon addressed the balkanization of minority groups on campus head-on in “Apartheid at Dartmouth” (TDR February 10, 1988). She questioned the notion that racism “makes it imperative for blacks and others to have special places to go where they can be with their own kind.” As a member of a family that had been targeted by the KKK in North Carolina, she wrote, this was an astonishing view of the condition on campus. She also had the good fortune to serve as editor of The Review while President Freedman and other faculty members were publicly slandering the students on the newspaper’s staff as racists and sexists, and when the Superior Court of New Hampshire ordered the College to reinstate two staff reporters after COS had seen fit to banish them over the William Cole affair. It would have been impossible for someone in her position not to gain an appreciation for the power of cooler heads and law properly interpreted to overcome even the loudest blowhards and the most passionately defended assumptions.

Her position on the paper led Dhillon to be featured in “60 Minutes,” The New York Times, and other media venues, gaining her national attention. She was an editor and writer for several years before pursuing a law degree at the University of Virginia, where she began a career marked by an intense focus on civil rights. Her campaign website (www.dhillon08.com) cites years of experience representing political refugees, minorities, and abused women, including “several South Asian women victims of a high-profile sex trafficking ring in Berkeley in 2002.” She also does a great deal of pro bono legal work. Dhillon, who describes herself as a civil libertarian, was part of the civil rights movement to protect Sikhs after many were targeted following the attacks of 9/11. Her defense of the Sikhs has put her in disagreement with the upper echelons of her own party. “I definitely do believe in a government that does not spy on its citizens, and does not do any of those things without getting a warrant,” she told The Review.

Harmeet Dhillon finds herself in the position of someone who, on paper, should have no trouble getting elected virtually anywhere else in the United States; she appeals to common sense on issues whose alternatives demonstrably fail, like ending sanctuary city practices, instituting market-based reforms for health care, and implementing a responsible budget free from entitlements and the clutches of special interests. If these tenets of economic conservatism aren’t enough to warm the cockles of the left-leaning voter’s heart, surely her history as an immigrant and civil rights activist will help.

According to an article she wrote for The Review’s twenty-fifth anniversary issue in 2006, Dhillon is a,

San Francisco-dwelling ACLU board member; an elected Republican official who actively participates in the Federalist Society yet also devotes a substantial amount of time to pro bono legal work on behalf of political refugees, battered women, and religious minorities; and who reviews litigation discovery documents while listening to rap—but prefers John Coltrane and Miles Davis for writing appellate briefs.

Surely the diversity of her viewpoints and commitment to the same principles that have always guided her work—namely, public service and civic responsibility—should be enough to get Dhillon elected anywhere. Republicans, however, have not managed better than 14% in the past three elections for the seat Dhillon wishes to occupy.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Ammiano rejected Dhillon’s offer for a debate on the issues to share their respective platforms with the electorate, saying, “My schedule does not permit me to participate in a debate.” He did reportedly find time to participate in Comedy Day at Golden Gate Park, cleverly comparing U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s hair to a Planet of the Apes prop. If this is democracy in the 13th District, God help Dhillon and her constituents, but it may be too late even for that.

Dhillon ‘89 Seeks California State Office

Article Tools

Related Articles