KAMALA HARRIS
Moving Our Future Forward
CLIMATE ACTION
Harris describes the climate crisis as an "existential threat." She has supported many of Biden's climate policies, including his decision to rejoin the Paris Agreement. She cast the tiebreaking vote in the Senate to pass the most significant clean energy and climate investment bill in U.S. history.
As vice president, Kamala Harris helped pass the most significant government investment into climate and clean energy initiatives, and grants to states to help recover from extreme weather events.
Harris's $10 trillion plan calls for net-zero emissions by 2045 and a carbon-neutral electricity sector by 2030. She also pledged to end federal support for the fossil fuel industry and called for a carbon tax.
Harris was an early cosponsor of the Green New Deal. This nonbinding congressional resolution will help the United States transition to 100 percent clean energy within a decade. She said she would eliminate the Senate filibuster to pass the deal if needed.
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
Kamala Harris wants to protect the right to abortion nationally as Roe v. Wade did before 2022. After the Dobbs ruling, she became central to the Biden campaign's efforts to keep the spotlight on abortion. In March, she made the first official visit to an abortion clinic by a president or vice president.
She consistently supported abortion rights during her time in the Senate. She cosponsored legislation that would have banned common state-level restrictions, like requiring doctors to perform specific tests or have hospital admitting privileges 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.
GUN REFORM
Harris called on every state to enact a red-flag law and announced the Biden-Harris administration's creation of a national resource center to help states implement them. Harris has long supported such laws and, as attorney general, backed California lawmakers' efforts to pass one in 2014, which made the state one of the earliest to enact such a policy.
Harris announced new federal rules in April that require background checks to be done by sellers at gun shows and online, aiming to tighten a loophole through which buyers and sellers in specific venues have escaped background checks. Harris has long supported universal background checks and called Congress to pass broader gun-control legislation.
Harris has criticized efforts to arm teachers in response to school shootings. As California attorney general, Harris supported a state law requiring people to show "good cause" to carry a concealed weapon. She supports other policies backed by gun-control groups that oppose allowing guns on college campuses.
LGBTQ+ RIGHTS
According to the ACLU, "The Biden-Harris administration has a strong record of protecting and expanding the freedom of LGBTQ people at a time when those freedoms have faced an unprecedented assault. The Biden-Harris administration has championed the Equality Act, but a vocal anti-LGBTQ minority has used the filibuster to delay its passage through Congress. Harris will work with the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division to use litigation to protect trans people across the country from discriminatory state laws.
In 2019, Kamal Harris called for ending mandatory minimum sentences, cash bail, and the death penalty, which disproportionately affects 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.
COST OF LIVING
Harris has proposed to lower the cost of living and ban price-gouging by big companies. She intends to cut needless bureaucracy and red tape, investigate anti-competitive behavior in the food supply, and propose a federal ban on price-gouging in food.
Red tape and barriers are constraining the housing supply, she said. "By the end of my first term, we will end America's housing shortage by building 3m new homes and affordable rentals for the middle class," she said. Harris has also proposed a $25,000 grant for first-time homebuyers to help with down payments.
"Under my plan, more than 100 million Americans would get a tax cut," Harris said, proposing a return of the earned income tax credit, child tax credit, and a $6,000 tax credit for new parents.
Harris has proposed to lower the cost of living and ban price-gouging by big companies. She intends to cut needless bureaucracy and red tape, investigate anti-competitive behavior in the food supply, and propose a federal ban on price-gouging in food.
MENTAL HEALTH
As Vice President, Kamala Harris led the White House's Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis, which has taken steps to address maternal mental health, such as launching the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline, training providers on maternal mental health and substance use disorders, and calling on states to expand and extend Medicaid postpartum medical and mental health coverage.
She supports making investments to expand mental health and substance use treatment, including to children and families and underserved populations, and to address the mental health workforce shortage by increasing licensing flexibilities for social workers.
She also supports the Safer Communities Act, which includes provisions to increase school behavioral health services (building on the Biden administration's American Rescue Plan Act) and strengthening state requirements for behavioral health care for Medicaid-enrolled youth in response to worsening youth mental health.
IMMIGRATION
Kamala Harris has said on multiple occasions that she will sign into law the tough border compromise that Congress could not pass in 2024 after Donald Trump objected to it. That bill would have closed loopholes in the asylum process, giving the president greater authority to shut down the border when crossings are high and limiting the parole of migrants, which allows them to enter the United States temporarily.
Her 2024 campaign team has said that her position on border crossings is the same as the Biden administration's and that "unauthorized border crossings are illegal." At the Democratic National Convention in August, she reiterated: "We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border."