Ahead of key interview, five questions Kamala Harris hasn’t answered yet | Elections News
On Thursday, US Vice President and presidential hopeful Kamala Harris will sit down for her first main broadcast interview since she turned the face of the Democratic Get together following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race.
She will likely be joined by her operating mate, Tim Walz, for the interview with CNN.
Till now, Harris has taken a cautious strategy in direction of the press, very similar to Biden, who has held fewer information conferences and media interviews than any of the previous seven US presidents, Axios reported, citing presidential scholar Martha Joynt Kumar.
Harris’s personal sparse engagement with the media has come below scrutiny, particularly from the Republicans. “She doesn’t know how to do a news conference; she’s not smart enough to do a news conference,” Republican challenger Donald Trump stated throughout a information convention of his personal on August 15.
To make certain, Harris has spoken on a number of key points that polls counsel matter to American voters, in marketing campaign rallies and coverage speeches. However with out the cross-questioning that an interview permits, the Democratic Get together’s presidential nominee’s positions on essential topics stay ambiguous.
So when is the interview and what are some of the questions Harris has yet to obviously reply?
When is Harris’s CNN interview?
Harris will communicate to CNN’s anchor and chief political correspondent Dana Bash alongside the Democratic Get together’s vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, at 9pm (01:00 GMT) on Thursday.
‘I won’t be silent’ on Gaza: How will she communicate up?
On July 26, following a gathering with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, Harris pledged to not keep silent on the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.
“We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent,” she advised reporters. Yet, concurrently, she pledged unwavering dedication to Israel.
”I’ve had an unwavering dedication to the existence of the State of Israel, to its safety, and to the individuals of Israel.”
US VP Kamala Harris says she expressed her ‘critical considerations’ to Israeli PM Netanyahu in regards to the ‘scale of human struggling in Gaza.’ pic.twitter.com/1U0KErqiDL
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 26, 2024
Within the month since she made this assertion, nevertheless, Harris’s relative silence on Gaza has come below hearth from critics who’ve questioned whether or not Harris’s coverage on Israel’s warfare will likely be any totally different from Biden’s.
Thus far, the reply, many consider, appears to be a agency no.
Amid hypothesis that she may at the least think about using restrictions on arms gross sales to Israel as leverage to persuade the federal government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cease massacres of Palestinians, her adviser on nationwide safety made clear that Harris had no such plans.
“She does not support an arms embargo on Israel,” Phil Gordon, the adviser, stated on August 8.
.@VP has been clear: she is going to at all times guarantee Israel is ready to defend itself towards Iran and Iran-backed terrorist teams. She doesn’t help an arms embargo on Israel. She is going to proceed to work to guard civilians in Gaza and to uphold worldwide humanitarian regulation.
— Phil Gordon (@PhilGordon46) August 8, 2024
At this yr’s Democratic Nationwide Conference (DNC), which was held from August 19 to August 22 in Chicago, Harris as soon as once more concurrently pledged help for Israel and expressed sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza.
Nevertheless, the Democrats refused to permit a Palestinian American to talk on the conference, whereas the mother and father of an Israeli-American captive held in Gaza had been allowed to take the stage.
Professional-Palestine protesters rallied exterior the DNC venue on all three days however had been blocked from marching too near the venue by police. Many warned that they’d not help Harris within the November vote except she ends unconditional help for Israel.
How will she ban ‘price gouging’?
On August 16, Harris proposed a ban on “price gouging” by meals suppliers and grocery shops.
Worth gouging refers to dramatically elevating costs to “unfair levels” in response to short-term excessive demand or shortage – usually following disasters, corresponding to flooding. Whereas a number of states already limit the observe for some items thought of important, there isn’t a federal regulation barring it.
The proposal might be in style. Excessive grocery invoice inflation is a key concern for a lot of voters. Beneath Biden’s administration, grocery costs have gone up by 21 p.c as half of an inflation surge.
However Harris has not spelt out how precisely she would go about enacting this ban on value gouging, incomes her backlash from political critics, in addition to business.
In a launch final week, the Trump marketing campaign referred to as her plan an instance of “communist price controls”.
Industrialists and economists additionally stated the plan might do extra hurt than good.
Harris’s plan is imprecise, however a central half of it includes getting the US Congress to cross the first-ever federal ban on value gouging in meals and grocery sectors, just like laws launched by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren final yr.
Yet political analysts level out that such laws has nearly no probability of passing in Congress — elevating questions in regards to the sincerity of Harris’s proposal.
Will she construct a border wall?
Harris has flip-flopped on the subject of immigration.
Throughout the DNC, she pledged that she would signal the now-defunct bipartisan border safety invoice that Trump wished to terminate out of fears that it might profit Democrats.
This invoice would have allotted $20m in direction of safety measures on the southern border with Mexico. The invoice additionally put aside a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars} for the development of a border wall that was a signature challenge undertaken by Trump, and criticised by many Democrats.
Certainly, throughout Trump’s administration, Harris had referred to as the thought of the wall “un-American”.
In 2020, she wrote in a Fb submit: “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer.”
When she declared her candidacy for her 2020 presidential race in 2019, she referred to as the wall Trump’s “medieval vanity project”.
Apart from pledging help for the invoice that funds the wall, there are different indicators of Harris’s hardening stance on immigration, together with marketing campaign commercials wherein she helps the thought of extra Border Patrol brokers.
This shift comes amid efforts by Republicans to carry Harris accountable for a surge in undocumented migrants into the US, by describing her as Biden’s “border czar”.
NEW AD: On the border, the selection is straightforward.
Kamala Harris is preventing to repair our damaged immigration system. Donald Trump is making an attempt to cease her. pic.twitter.com/t200w8iAYv
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) July 30, 2024
What’s her place on Medicare for All?
When Harris was a senator for California, she signed on as a co-sponsor for Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All laws which referred to as for a single-payer medical health insurance system to supply everybody within the US with complete healthcare.
Nevertheless, Harris’s financial plan this time is silent on Medicare for All. So, it’s unclear if she nonetheless backs the thought or has dropped it solely.
Will Harris ban fracking?
Throughout her 2019 major run, Harris had additionally pledged to ban fracking – the controversial approach of extracting oil and gasoline from shale rock by drilling the earth.
The observe causes earth tremors and has a excessive environmental value because the process consumes giant quantities of water, along with releasing methane, a greenhouse gasoline.
Nevertheless, Harris appears to have taken a U-turn on fracking throughout her presidential marketing campaign this yr. In late July, her marketing campaign officers confirmed that she won’t search to ban fracking if elected.
Trump had invoked her 2019 anti-fracking stance to criticise her.
The Biden administration allowed fracking. Harris herself has not made a public assertion about whether or not or not she is going to ban fracking if she rises to the highest job.