Harmeet Dhillon Opposes Ammiano for State Assembly

Attorney Harmeet Dhillon has a formidable challenge ahead. The Republican candidate for the state Assembly in the 13th District of eastern San Francisco has to overcome a lopsided Democrat-dominated registration to defeat a popular progressive San Francisco supervisor, Democrat Tom Ammiano, who led passage of San Francisco’s domestic partner and universal health care statutes.

Ammiano and Dhillon were the only candidates, even including those from minor parties, who filed by the March 7 deadline, so they are unopposed in the June primary and will face off in November.

The state Secretary of State’s Office in January reported that about 57 percent of voters in the district were registered Democrats, nine percent Republicans and 28 percent declined to specify.

Ammiano, a leader of the city’s gay community, has represented Bernal Heights and Mission districts since 1994. He is being forced out by term limits. Besides the Mission, the 13th Assembly District includes Chinatown, downtown, Hunter’s Point, Pacific Heights, Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill and the Castro, but not the Richmond and Sunset districts and the Western Addition.

Dhillon and Ammiano are vying for a seat currently held by Assemblyman Mark Leno, who is termed out of office and is running for the state Senate in the June Democratic primary against incumbent Senator Carole Migden of San Francisco and challenger Joe Nation, a former member of the state Assembly from San Rafael, Calif.

According to media reports, Indian American Republican Sashi McEntee, a management consultant in Mill Valley, Calif., is unopposed in the Republican primary for the state Senate seat.

If Ammiano thinks he will be in a cakewalk, Dhillon, who has been active in GOP politics since serving in the late 1980s as an editor of the conservative Ivy League journal, The Dartmouth Review, has other ideas.

A partner of the law firm of Dhillon & Smith in downtown San Francisco, she told India-West she believes Ammiano is vulnerable on the very issues that he will campaign on – social entitlements that boost taxes and other costs for businesses.

It is a trend that may compel more firms to leave San Francisco, she asserted. This position is frequently articulated by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who named Dhillon one of 12 delegates with full-voting power to the California Republican Party; and Senator John McCain, who Dhillon is supporting enthusiastically for president. She has also served as a member of the platform and resolutions committees of the California Republican Party. Dhillon opposes extending rent control in San Francisco and making restaurants post their calorie counts on menus.

"Rent control artificially distorts the San Francisco market, discourages property owners from investing in properties and prevents new investors from coming into the market," she stated.

The restaurant regulations Dhillon calls typical of the "nanny state, with government knowing what is best for you…There is just too much taxes and regulations on small businesses. It is out of control."

Dhillon said she understands the seriousness of the health care crisis, but does not feel small businesses should shoulder all the costs. Despite not being subject to San Francisco’s new ordinance, she and her partner, attorney Harold P. "Peter" Smith II, provide health care for their six employees. At the firm, she specializes in commercial litigation and private equity transactions.

Dhillon said local Republican Party leaders persuaded her to run in her first bid for public office. She hopes to raise "at least six figures" for the campaign from friends, family, business interests, the local Indian American community and donors outside the state.

Ammiano, who challenged San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown unsuccessfully in the 1999 election, had $400,000 in his war chest, but has spent some of the money.

Dhillon is realistic that state and national GOP leaders won’t place winning an Assembly district in liberal San Francisco "at the top of their list."

After graduating from Dartmouth and getting her law degree from the University of Virginia, Dhillon has clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Paul V. Niemeyer in the Fourth Circuit Court in Baltimore, Md. She donates time pro bono to civil rights groups. When South Asians were targeted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she became director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (2002-05). Dhillon also was a director of the South Asian Bar Association of Northern California (2001-04), director of the Support Network for Battered Women in Santa Clara County (2001-03), and is currently a Sikh Foundation trustee and legal counsel to the Sikh American legal Defense and Education Fund. She bristled a bit when it was suggested that being an ACLU board member sets her apart from the GOP mainstream. "Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and Republicans in the South in the civil rights movement (fought) Southern Democrats," she told India-West.

"McCain supports immigrants’ rights…and religious liberties are supported wholeheartedly by Republicans."

Born in Chandigarh, Dhillon’s family moved to the United Kingdom when she was six months old. Her brother was born in the U.K., and her father, an orthopedic surgeon, moved the family to rural North Carolina to set up his practice. Her father and mother now reside in Raleigh, N.C.

Dhillon, in a 25th anniversary celebration of the Dartmouth Review in 2006, remembered, "When I arrived at Dartmouth 20 years ago, I was a 16-year-old naïf whom fate had delivered from my birthplace in the Punjab to a public school education in the backwoods of rural North Carolina."

"My father had chosen to start his medical practice there, without apparent concern for the signs on the highway proclaiming ‘the Ku Klux Klan welcomes you to Smithfield, North Carolina.’"

Now an Indian American immigrant to the U.S., a fiscally conservative Republican, is running against a leader of the gay community in San Francisco.

Ammiano, Dhillon told India-West, "has never had to meet a payroll" and "is very progressive with other people’s money." She looks forward to any and all debates with the liberal Ammiano on the issues.

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