VP Harris: ‘America, We Are Not Going Back’

As the Democratic National Convention drew to a close Thursday night in Chicago, friends and allies cast Vice President Kamala Harris as a candidate raised in the middle class with values and convictions, who will defend and protect women and their reproductive rights, stand up to the gun lobby, and tackle climate change.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) described Harris as someone who “can’t be bossed around” and who’s not afraid to fight big corporations. “She’ll take on drug companies that charge an arm and a leg for prescriptions … And she’ll take on right-wing extremists who think they should decide who has access to abortion or IVF [in vitro fertilization],” Warren said.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said everyone has a responsibility to care for the planet — something Trump never learned. “He called the climate crisis a hoax. He made it easier for big companies to poison our air and water,” Haaland said. Harris, on the other hand, held polluters accountable when they spilled oil in the San Francisco Bay, she said.

“She defended President Obama’s Clean Power Plan in court, and as vice president, she cast a tie-breaking vote for the most ambitious climate action plan in our nation’s history,” Haaland said, referring to the Inflation Reduction Act. “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will fight for a future where we all have clean air, clean water, and healthy communities.”

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) talked about caring for her mother as she was dying from brain cancer and noted that likewise, Harris took care of her own mother who died of colon cancer in 2009. Those experiences have driven Harris to fight for lower healthcare costs, according to Whitmer. “She’s lived a life like ours. She knows us,” Whitmer said. “Donald Trump doesn’t know you at all … Do you think he’s ever had to take items out of the cart before checking out?”

Former Rep. Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords (D-Ariz.) was forced to learn to walk again and talk again “one word at a time” after a gunman tried to assassinate her and killed six other people on Jan. 8, 2011. In Harris, Giffords sees another resilient woman. “She is tough. She has grit. Kamala can beat the gun lobby,” Giffords said.

In telling her own story to the nation and accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination as their presidential candidate, Harris spoke about her Indian-born mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, and how she pushed Kamala and her younger sister Maya to fight for justice. “She was tough, courageous, a trailblazer in the fight for women’s health, and she taught Maya and me … to never complain about injustice, but do something about it,” Harris said.

And in this moment, something clearly has to be done, she said. “We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare. We are not going back to when he tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions,” Harris said, adding that America cannot be “prosperous” unless Americans can make decisions about their lives.

Harris said that over the last 2 years, following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, she heard stories from women robbed of the right to make those decisions for themselves: women who miscarried in parking lots, who developed sepsis, or who lost the ability to have children at all because state abortion bans led doctors to fear they would go to jail for providing emergency care. She placed the blame for these tragedies squarely on Trump, who “hand-picked” the Supreme Court justices who stripped women of their reproductive freedoms.

“As a part of his agenda, he and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress,” Harris said. Trump also has a plan to install a “national anti-abortion coordinator” and to require all states to report abortions and miscarriages, she said, referring to some of the ideas outlined in Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint for the federal government that was written by a group that included many former Trump administration officials. Trump has denied any knowledge of the document.

Other freedoms are at risk too, Harris said, including “the freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities and places of worship, the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride, the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis, and the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote.”

“Consider what he intends to do if we give him power again,” she said. “America, we are not going back.”