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    It's not easy being the first but for Kamala Harris it has become a habit

    It took less than one day after Kamala Harris was announced as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee for a racist and baseless “birther” conspiracy theory to start circulating among her critics.The morning after Joe Biden named Harris as his running mate, making her the first black woman and the first Asian American to join a major party’s presidential ticket, Newsweek published an op-ed casting doubt upon the California senator’s US citizenship because she was born to immigrant parents.The argument was immediately discredited by legal experts, who noted Harris was born in a hospital in Oakland, California, and was thus undeniably a US citizen.But that irrefutable evidence did not stop Donald Trump, one of the champions of the similarly baseless birther claims against Barack Obama, from stoking the conspiracy theory.“I just heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Trump said at an August press conference. “But that’s a very serious, you’re saying that, they’re saying that she doesn’t qualify because she wasn’t born in this country.”The president has continued his attacks against Harris in the two months since, most recently calling her a “monster” after last Wednesday’s vice-presidential debate.Trump’s efforts to demonize Harris have taken on an added element of desperation heading into the final weeks of the presidential election, as polls show Biden leading nationally and in major battleground states.The Democratic ticket’s significant polling advantage increases the likelihood that Harris will indeed become the country’s first female vice-president, potentially setting her up for a successful White House bid after Biden leaves office.But Trump’s comments have underscored a consistent theme of Harris’s entire political career, one that will probably only be amplified if she becomes vice-president: it’s not easy being the first.…Harris’s involvement with political activism started when she was a child, a fact that she has frequently touted on the campaign trail. Her mother, a cancer researcher from India, and her father, an economist from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s and became involved with the civil rights movement. More

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    Kamala Harris questions Amy Coney Barrett over the Affordable Care Act – video

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    Supreme court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was questioned by Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris over the Affordable Care Act, known popularly as Obamacare, during day two of the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing. Barrett made the claim that she was not aware of Donald Trump’s campaign promise to appoint justices who would dismantle Obamacare. Harris also tackled Barrett’s views on abortion, making a carefully laid-out case that despite Barrett’s equivocation and insistence that she is unbiased on the issue of reproductive rights, she is far from it. Republicans want to have Barrett confirmed before election day
    Amy Coney Barrett dodges abortion, healthcare and election law questions
    Kamala Harris grilling prompts doubtful claim from Amy Coney Barrett

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    Kamala Harris grilling prompts doubtful claim from Amy Coney Barrett

    Amy Coney Barrett

    Democratic senator and vice-presidential nominee condemns Republican push to overturn healthcare law and abortion rights

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    Kamala Harris questions Amy Coney Barrett over the Affordable Care Act – video

    Kamala Harris delivered a blistering rebuke of Republican efforts to tear down healthcare and abortion access as she grilled Amy Coney Barrett, prompting the supreme court nominee to make the unbelievable claim that she was not aware of Donald Trump’s campaign promise to appoint justices who would dismantle Obamacare.
    Speaking via teleconference during Barrett’s Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, the Democratic senator and vice-presidential nominee began with a campaign speech about the importance of accessible healthcare amid the coronavirus – highlighting the number of Americans who would lose insurance if the 2010 Affordable Care Act were repealed in five states where Republican senators are struggling to win re-election.
    She then addressed Barrett: “Prior to your nomination, were you aware of President Trump’s statement committing to nominate judges who will strike down the Affordable Care Act? And I’d appreciate a yes or no answer.”
    Barrett maintained that before she was nominated to the supreme court, she was unaware of his public statements. “I don’t recall hearing about or seeing such statements,” Barrett said.
    Harris asked how many months after Barrett wrote an article criticizing John Roberts’ decision upholding the Affordable Care Act she received her nomination for her appeals court position.
    “The Affordable Care Act and all of its protections hinge on this seat,” Harris said.
    “I would hope the committee would trust my integrity,” Barrett said, noting, as she has done throughout the hearings, that she has not made any commitments to rule a certain way on the healthcare law.
    The assertion, and Barrett’s implication that she had somehow tuned out the president’s loud, public criterion for judges he’d appoint, is difficult to believe.
    Harris, the former attorney general of California, is famous for her prosecutorial style of questioning. Her sharp interrogation of Donald Trump’s last Supreme Court nominee – now Justice Brett Kavanaugh – helped elevate her political profile.

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    Complete exchange between Sen. Kamala Harris and Judge Kavanaugh on Mueller Investigation.Kavanaugh: “I would like to know the person you’re thinking of.”Sen. Harris: “I think you’re thinking of someone and you don’t want to tell us.” pic.twitter.com/3bP7rJ6u0L

    August 11, 2020

    Harris also tackled Barrett’s views on abortion, making a carefully laid-out case that despite Barrett’s equivocation and insistence that she is unbiased on the issue of reproductive rights, she is far from it.
    Barrett was a member of a “right to life” organization that in 2016 promoted a crisis pregnancy center in South Bend, Indiana, that has been criticized for misleading and misdirecting vulnerable women seeking abortions. She has signed off on a newspaper ad calling Roe v Wade – the landmark 1973 ruling protecting the right to choose – “barbaric”. A Notre Dame Magazine article from 2013 describes a lecture series during which Barrett “spoke … to her own conviction that life begins at conception”.
    As a federal judge, she has considered three laws restricting abortion and expressed misgivings about rulings that had struck down the laws. She joined the dissent against a decision to strike down an Indiana abortion rule – signed into law by Mike Pence when the vice-president was Indiana’s governor – that mandated the fetal remains be buried or cremated.
    “I would suggest that we not pretend that we don’t know how this nominee views a women’s right to choose or make her own decisions,” Harris said. The senator noted that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom Barrett has cited as her model in declining to give any hints on how she would vote on future cases, was, unlike Barrett, much more forthcoming with her own personal views on abortion.
    Harris did not ask Barrett a direct question about Roe v Wade, driving home the point that her views have already been made plain.
    Harris ended by asking to enter into the record letters opposing Barrett’s nomination from the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Planned Parenthood.

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    Mike Pence and Kamala Harris spar on Covid, race and climate in VP debate – video highlights

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    Mike Pence and Kamala Harris met in Utah for the only vice-presidential debate of the election, separated by Plexiglass barriers as a protection against coronavirus.
    From the pandemic to healthcare and race to the supreme court, via a fly, here are some of the key moments
    Pence-Harris vice-presidential debate: six key takeaways
    Battle for the suburbs: can Joe Biden flip Texas? – video

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    'They're coming for you': Harris slams Trump and Pence on healthcare – video

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    One of the most memorable moments of the vice-presidential debate was on healthcare, when Harris issued a stark warning about the Trump administration’s intentions.
    Trump is seeking to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, which prevents health companies turning away patients with pre-existing conditions.
    ‘If you have a pre-existing condition, heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, they’re coming for you. If you love someone who has a pre-existing condition, they’re coming for you.’
    Pence responded by claiming the Trump administration has a plan to protect people with pre-existing conditions. Trump has spent years claiming he will release a comprehensive healthcare plan. We’re yet to see it
    US election polls tracker: who is leading in the swing states?
    Battle for the suburbs: can Joe Biden flip Texas? – video

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    Looks speak louder than words as Harris makes quotable case against Pence

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    The vice-presidential debate was more courteous than last week’s horror show but still showed two contrasting faces of America

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    ‘They’re coming for you’: Harris slams Trump and Pence on healthcare – video

    It was always going to be about the two faces of America.
    One: white, male, midwestern, evangelical Christian. The other: Black, female, coastal, progressive.
    What wasn’t so predictable about the face-to-face at Wednesday’s US vice-presidential debate was that Mike Pence would show up with bloodshot eye – never a good look during a pandemic – or that a fly would nestle in his snowy white hair.
    Equally striking was Kamala Harris’s ability to weaponise facial expressions. The California senator’s fusillade of raised eyebrows, pursed lips and withering stares at her opponent will live in Democrats’ memory long after the words are forgotten (and probably be viewed by Republicans as sneering elitism).
    It was also notable that both candidates did a better job than their bosses in last week’s debate apocalypse. Both were adept at sidestepping questions – such as whether they had discussed “the issue of presidential disability” with their septuagenarian running mates – in favour of talking points. At times, it almost felt like a brief holiday in political normality.
    This may also have been a sneak preview of the 2024 election. Harris was on her game and looked ready to take over from Trump’s Democratic presidential challenger, Joe Biden. Pence, the current vice-president, used attack lines on taxes, the Green New Deal and the supreme court that Trump failed to land against Biden last week.
    It was hardly a surprise that Pence reeked of white male privilege; it was less anticipated that the target was the moderator, Susan Page of USA Today, as much as Harris. Showing no respect for her questions, rules or timekeeping, he just kept talking and often called her “Susan”.
    Struggling to gain control, she pleaded: “I did not create the rules for tonight … I’m here to enforce them.”
    So with that, Republicans may have lost more suburban women voters, if that is even possible. But the bottom line is that this VP debate won’t change the race.
    It took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, with the candidates separated by two Perspex screens, a metaphor if ever there was one for America’s divisions and self-affirming bubbles.
    Pence wore a dark suit, white shirt and Trumpian red tie; Harris sported a black jacket, dark blouse and necklace; both wore Stars and Stripes badges.
    The former prosecutor made her case to the jury with a bald statement about the coronavirus pandemic that would prove impossible to top: “The American people have witnessed the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country.”
    She added for good measure that “this administration has forfeited their right to re-election based on this”.
    Pence had the unenviable task of defending the indefensible. “From the very first day, President Donald Trump has put the health of America first,” he claimed unconvincingly, during a pandemic that has claimed more than 210,000 American lives and infected more than 7 million people. Harris pulled another of her scathing lawyerly expressions.
    Pence, head of the White House coronavirus taskforce, went on to offer a highly disingenuous defence that bore little relation to Harris’s critique: “When you say what the American people have done over these last eight months hasn’t worked, that’s a great disservice to the sacrifices of the American people.”
    Pence also claimed that the Biden-Harris plan for dealing with Covid-19 looks awfully similar to what the Trump administration is already doing. “It looks a bit like plagiarism, which is something Joe Biden knows a little bit about.”
    It was a reference to Biden failing to credit the British Labour leader Neil Kinnock in a speech 33 years ago. Harris shook her head wryly. More

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    Mike Pence struggles to defend the indefensible and please his disastrous boss | Richard Wolffe

    It’s rare that something unexpected and unrehearsed crosses Mike Pence’s head. The sitting vice-president is a disciplined performer known to prep for his public moments, in stark contrast to his boss.But as the vice-presidential debate neared its close, with the candidates tackling the challenges of racial justice, a dark object landed on his blanched white scalp.Pence was expressing his faux sympathy for the family of Breonna Taylor, while also condemning the notion that America is systemically racist, when a large fly found the smell of his words as attractive as the brown debris that decorates a dog run.It was that kind of night for Mike Pence: a night to polish the turds of the Trump years.When he’s not serving as a cardboard cutout smiling over Donald Trump’s shoulder, Mike Pence likes to play the role of a genial veterinarian delivering the sad news about your dead pet hamster.Drained of all blood, the sitting vice-president doesn’t need a white coat to lament the nature of the world in front of him. The strained smile on his face is a pained reminder that all isn’t right with the world.Until now, Pence has simply grieved for an America suffering from his fever dreams about the socialist threat. But after four years inside a Trump White House, that suffering looks a little more real, and a lot more deadly.The night did not start well for Pence because it started with the pandemic. What else is there to debate?“The American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country,” said Kamala Harris, who consistently played the role of fly paper to the lies that have filled the air for the last four years.Harris pointed out that, according to Bob Woodward, Trump knew about the threat of the pandemic back in late January. “They knew and they covered it up. The president said it was a hoax. They minimized the seriousness of it … Frankly, this administration has forfeited their right to re-election based on this.”“Our nation has gone through a very challenging time this year,” lamented our vice-veterinarian. “But I want the American people to know that from the very first day, President Donald Trump has put the health of America first.”This will be news to the families of more than 200,000 dead Americans, as well as the White House staff currently struggling with a president spreading a full viral load around the executive mansion and the West Wing.Faced with this storm of excrement, Pence found his refuge hiding behind something he called “the American people”.“When you say what the American people have done over these last several months hasn’t worked, that’s a great disservice to the sacrifices the American people have made,” said Pence, as if his boss was the entire American population rolled into the Covid-filled body of a former reality TV star.“The American people I believe deserve credit for the sacrifices they have made for the health of their family, and their neighbors, our doctors, nurses, first responders.”This kind of piously indignant pabulum is not a new performance for the current vice-president but rather something he perfected as a talkshow radio host in Indiana in the late 1990s. Pence styled himself as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf” which is just the kind of awshucks deception that is so vital to serving as a cardboard cutout behind Donald Trump’s shoulder.You need a lot of decaf to pretend to be a Christian conservative while fawning over a president who pays off porn stars.Four years ago, Pence’s skills as an un-drugged Limbaugh were evident as he debated Tim Kaine in the vice-presidential encounter that literally nobody remembers from the 2016 campaign. For the record, Kaine came off hot and bothered, while Pence glided through the contest like a winged insect bouncing off the surface of a septic tank.On Wednesday night, Pence faced a very different opponent. Kamala Harris may be a senator, like Kaine, but otherwise the two Democratic veep candidates could not be more of a contrast.Kaine speaks like a Jesuit missionary who became a lawyer, a mayor and a governor. He is as reasonable as he is socially conscious. Harris is a Howard University graduate and career-long prosecutor. She preps hard and she wins cases. Kaine looked like he was suffering while Harris looked like she was having fun.The sad truth of the veep debate is that, much like the job the candidates are auditioning for, the contest isn’t worth a bucket of warm piss. It was FDR’s veep who said that, and – to prove his point – nobody can remember his name.It’s tempting to think that Pence versus Harris is somehow different, like everything else in this year from hell.Pence, after all, led the coronavirus taskforce that prayed away the pandemic so well. No wonder his boss gasped on video, under a heavy coating of orange makeup, “this was a blessing from God.”Sitting behind a couple of Plexiglass barriers, to catch the divine-like virus, Pence had by far the hardest job on stage: to defend both his disastrous record, and to please his disastrous boss.In many ways, this was a three-way contest, between Harris, Pence and Trump. But only Pence cared about the Trump voice in his head. And that astonishingly loud, gasping voice constantly distracted Pence from the contest on stage.It does not take much imagination to conjure up a world in which Pence is sworn into the presidency just before the people kick him out of officeFor starters, Trump – excluded for some weird reason from this TV show – could not shut his mouth on social media for the entire evening. This was of course a repeat performance of his debate with Joe Biden last week. It was also the unfortunate side-effect of large doses of steroids that make him look and feel like the top of a Duracell.Perhaps the incessant yapping was merely the latest sign of presidential insecurity about someone who is a heartbeat away from a Covid-infected septuagenarian’s job. It does not take much imagination to conjure up a world in which Pence is sworn into the presidency just before the people kick him out of office.For that matter, it isn’t far-fetched to worry about Joe Biden’s health either, as this pandemic rips through Washington DC, thanks to the man he’s trying to unseat. This White House is responsible for 34 infected individuals all on its own, it emerged just before the veep debate.When asked the tricky question about Trump’s health – and a possible Pence presidency – the vice-president ignored the subject as carefully as he has ignored the scientific advice on Covid. “Let me say, on behalf of the president and the first lady, how moved we have all been by the outpouring of prayers and concern for the president,” Pence said, on the verge of the most sincere outpouring of concern.Kamala Harris proved, as she has all along, that she was more than equal to the task of appearing presidential – and dodging the pesky questions of a presidential debate. When asked the same question, she pivoted neatly to turn the table back on Trump.Should Biden reveal his health records? “Absolutely,” said Harris. “And that’s why Joe Biden has been so incredibly transparent. And by contrast, the president has not. Both in terms of health records, but also let’s look at in terms of taxes.”In truth, both candidates were equally matched debaters. Pence dodged everything about climate change. Harris dodged everything about packing the supreme court.What was unequal was that Pence had to defend the indefensible: a disastrous and preventable death toll, a collapsing economy and a Covid-infected president.Trailing in every poll in every state that counts, Pence and Trump needed something to change on Wednesday night.They needed Harris to flame out, or seem like a raving revolutionary, or perhaps forget how to speak. Instead she punched and parried, and looked like she loved the spotlight as much as the fly that stuck to her opponent’s skull. More