Tax, abortion and immigration: Where Kamala Harris stands on America’s key issues

July 24, 2024

Ms Harris also wants to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 35%, higher than Mr Biden's proposal of 28%.


Ms Harris has shown support for the Biden administration's economic measures, including the 2021 American Rescue Plan and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.Ms Harris also wants to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 35%, higher than Mr Biden's proposal of 28%. Ms Harris has shown support for the Biden administration's economic measures, including the 2021 American Rescue Plan and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

As Vice President Kamala Harris prepares to replace President Biden on the Democratic ticket, her positions on important subjects will be scrutinised by both parties and voters. She has extensive political experience, having served as San Francisco's district attorney, California's attorney general, a senator, a presidential contender, and vice president. Here's an overview of where she stands. Abortion Ms. Harris favours legislation that would guarantee the right to abortion on a nationwide level, like Roe v. Wade did before being reversed in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organisation in 2022. Following the Dobbs verdict, she became essential to the Biden campaign's efforts to maintain the attention on abortion, despite Mr. Biden's own discomfort with it.

Climate change

Ms. Harris has supported the Biden administration’s climate efforts, including legislation that provided hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and rebates for renewable energy and electric vehicles.

“It is clear the clock is not just ticking, it is banging,” she said in a speech last year, referring to increasingly severe and frequent disasters spurred by climate change. “And that is why, one year ago, President Biden and I made the largest climate investment in America’s history.”

She consistently supported abortion rights during her time in the Senate, including cosponsoring legislation that would have banned common state-level restrictions, like requiring doctors to perform specific tests or have hospital admitting privileges in order to provide abortions.


As a presidential candidate in 2019, she argued that states with a history of restricting abortion rights in violation of Roe should be subject to what is known as pre-clearance for new abortion laws — those laws would have to be federally approved before they could take effect. That proposal is not viable now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe.



Democracy

Ms. Harris was tasked with leading the Biden administration’s efforts to secure voting rights legislation, a job she asked for. The legislation — which went through several iterations but was ultimately blocked in the Senate — would have countered voting restrictions in Republican-led states, limited gerrymandering and regulated campaign finance more strictly.

This year, she met with voting rights advocates and described a strategy that included creating a task force on threats to election workers and challenging state voting restrictions in court.

She has condemned former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. In a speech in 2022 marking the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, she said that day had showed “what our nation would look like if the forces who seek to dismantle our democracy are successful.” She added, “What was at stake then, and now, is the right to have our future decided the way the Constitution prescribes it: by we the people, all the people.”

Economic policy

In campaign events this year, Ms. Harris has promoted the Biden administration’s economic policies, including the infrastructure bill that Mr. Biden signed, funding for small businesses, a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that capped the cost of insulin for people on Medicare and student debt forgiveness.

She indicated at an event in May that the administration’s policies to combat climate change would also bring economic benefits by creating jobs in the renewable energy industry. At another event, she promoted more than $100 million in Energy Department grants for auto parts manufacturers to pivot to electric vehicles, which she said would “help to keep our auto supply chains here in America.”

As a senator, she introduced legislation that would have provided a tax credit of up to $6,000 for middle- and low-income families, a proposal she emphasized during her presidential campaign as a way to address income inequality.

Immigration

One of Ms. Harris’s mandates as vice president has been to address the root causes of migration from Latin America, like poverty and violence in migrants’ home countries. Last year, she announced $950 million in pledges from private companies to support Central American communities. Similar commitments made previously totaled about $3 billion.

In 2021, she visited the U.S.-Mexico border and said: “This issue cannot be reduced to a political issue. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we are talking about suffering.”

More recently, she backed a bipartisan border security deal that Mr. Biden endorsed but Mr. Trump, by urging Republican lawmakers to kill it, effectively torpedoed. The legislation would have closed the border if crossings reached a set threshold, and it would have funded thousands of new border security agents and asylum officers. “We are very clear, and I think most Americans are clear, that we have a broken immigration system and we need to fix it,” Ms. Harris said in March.

Israel and Gaza

Ms. Harris called in March for an “immediate cease-fire” in Gaza and described the situation there as a “humanitarian catastrophe.” She said that “the threat Hamas poses to the people of Israel must be eliminated” but also that “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”

Racial justice

Racial justice was a theme of Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign. In a memorable debate exchange in 2019, she denounced Mr. Biden’s past work with segregationist senators and opposition to school busing mandates.


She has called for ending mandatory minimum sentences, cash bail and the death penalty, which disproportionately affect people of color.

Amid the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, she was one of the senators who introduced the Justice in Policing Act, which would have made it easier to prosecute police officers, created a national registry of police misconduct and required officers to complete training on racial profiling. It was not passed.


Her record as a prosecutor also came into play during her presidential campaign. Critics noted that as attorney general of California, she had generally avoided stepping in to investigate police killings.