Biden and Harris to hold 1st joint event since he dropped out, touting lower drug costs
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will hold their first joint event since Biden exited the 2024 race and endorsed her to take his place atop the Democratic ticket.
The two will deliver remarks at 1:30 p.m. ET at the official event being held Prince George’s County Community College in Maryland. They will talk about the economy and what their administration’s done to alleviate costs for Americans.
That includes the administration’s announcement earlier Thursday that the Department of Health and Human Services reached an agreement on price negotiations for 10 commonly used drugs that they say will save Medicare enrollees $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs when the new prices go into effect in 2026.
“It’s a relief for the millions of seniors that take these drugs to treat everything from heart failure, blood clots, diabetes, arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and more — and it’s a relief for American taxpayers,” Biden said in a statement.
While Biden will celebrate the outcome alongside Harris, she put out her own statement, calling the deal “lifechanging for so many of our loved ones across the nation.”
“Every American should be able to access the health care they need no matter their income or wealth. That is why President Biden and I fought to lower the costs of health care with our Inflation Reduction Act, transformational legislation that I was proud to cast the tie-breaking vote on in the Senate,” she said.
The price negotiations are part of the Inflation Reduction Act, a 2022 law that allows the government to directly broker with drug manufacturers for the first time in the history of the Medicare program. In addition to the 10 drugs negotiated for 2026, the government can select 15 more drugs for negotiation in 2027 and another 15 drugs for 2028 and up to 20 more drugs each year after.
While Harris is associating herself with Biden’s agenda to lower costs on Thursday, it comes one day before she is set to make campaign remarks in North Carolina about her own economic platform to deal with the rising cost of living, which will be her first major policy rollout since becoming the party’s nominee.
Harris on Friday will propose a federal ban on corporate price-gouging on food and groceries, her campaign announced. She will also call for giving the Federal Trade Commission as well as state attorneys general the power to investigate and punish companies that violate the new rules.
“Vice President Harris and Governor Walz know that price fluctuations are normal in free markets,” the campaign said in a press release. “But there’s a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business. Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills.”
Recently, Harris has also called for eliminating a tax on tips for service workers — a plan former President Donald Trump had introduced weeks ago. Her campaign also said her economic agenda will feature items to lower health care and housing costs.
Trump, in his own remarks delivered Wednesday that were also intended to focus on the economy, slammed the Biden-Harris administration record and briefly outlined his proposal to eliminate the tax on tips and taxes on Social Security benefits for seniors.
Trump’s criticisms often included falsehoods about the state of the economy and his own record, as he hit Biden and Harris over inflation.
“With four more years of Harris, your finances will never recover, they’re never going to recover. Our country will never recover, frankly, more importantly. It will be unrecoverable,” he claimed. “Vote Trump, and your incomes will soar, your savings will grow, young people will be able to afford a home and we will bring back the American dream bigger, better and stronger than ever before.”
ABC News’ Fritz Farrow and Lalee Ibssa contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — GOP vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance on Monday magnified a false claim that Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.
In a post on X, Vance published a video of himself at a July Senate Banking Committee hearing, reading a letter from Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck about the city’s challenges in keeping up with housing for the growing Haitian immigrant population.
In the post, Vance pushed the false claim that Haitian immigrants are kidnapping and eating people’s pets in Springfield.
“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” Vance wrote on X. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he asked, a term that Republicans have attempted to tag Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris with, although she has denied holding that role.
But Heck debunked those claims about Springfield in a statement to ABC News.
“In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” Heck said in his statement.
“Additionally, there have been no verified instances of immigrants engaging in illegal activities such as squatting or littering in front of residents’ homes. Furthermore, no reports have been made regarding members of the immigrant community deliberately disrupting traffic,” Heck said.
According to the Springfield News-Sun, the Springfield Police Department has not received any reports of pets being stolen and eaten.
The false claim that immigrants are targeting people’s pets stemmed from a social media posting originally from a Springfield Facebook group that went viral, where the poster wrote that their neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost her cat. The poster went on to make an unsubstantiated claim of Haitians allegedly taking the cat for food.
The post was picked up by people on social media, including rightwing activist Turning Points’ Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk.
Springfield, Ohio, has been at the center of several rumors concerning Haitian immigrants. The city even created a webpage debunking some claims.
Migrants have been drawn to the region because of low cost of living and work opportunities, the city says on its site. The city estimates there are around 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants living in the county, and that the rapid rise in population has strained housing, health care, and school resources. But the city also says that the migrants are in the country legally and that many are recipients of Temporary Protected Status from the federal government.
On Monday, Ohio Attorney General David Yost said the population in Springfield has grown by more than a third. In a statement, he announced he’s directing his office to “research legal avenues to stop the federal government from sending an unlimited number of migrants to Ohio communities.”
“The problem is not migrants, it is way, way too many migrants in a short period of time,” Yost said in his statement. “The problem is a massive increase in the population without any communication or assistance from the federal government.”
A spokesperson for Vance did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
(WASHINGTON) — After more than three years supporting President Joe Biden’s policy agenda as his deputy, Vice President Kamala Harris must articulate her own agenda for her presidential campaign — and the first term that could follow.
Since Biden announced on Sunday that he was leaving the 2024 race, Harris has secured commitments from enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee if they all honor their commitment when voting, according to ABC News reporting.
Now Harris — who ran well to the left of Biden during her unsuccessful presidential primary campaign in 2020, but has since become a loyal advocate of the administration’s policies — is taking on the challenge of establishing her own path forward and stance on key issues that matter most to voters as the November election approaches.
Her 2020 platform and some remarks from during her vice presidency offer a glimpse of a Harris presidency that could prove more progressive than Biden’s in several key areas.
Israel-Gaza
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, with Harris — who, as vice president, customarily presides over such proceedings — noticeably absent.
While Harris’ team has said her absence is merely the result of a scheduling conflict and the vice president will meet one-on-one with Netanyahu later this week, she has in recent months signaled that she may take a more stern approach to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
In the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Harris was initially a strong supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas — knocking down a suggestion that the Biden administration might condition aid to the country in November, saying “we are not going to create any conditions on the support that we are giving Israel to defend itself.”
But by December, Harris began wading deeper into Middle Eastern diplomacy during a trip to Dubai for a United Nations climate conference where she also met with leaders from the region. During the trip, she took a more forceful tone with Israel than many other senior administration officials had done at the time, declaring “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” and saying the administration believes “Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians.”
In a March address in Selma, Alabama, marking the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Harris called out Israel again — saying its government “must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid — no excuses” and calling on Israel to open border crossings and ensure humanitarian workers were not targeted.
In an interview published earlier this month in The Nation, Harris said young Americans protesting the war in Gaza are “showing exactly what the human emotion should be” and that while she “absolutely rejects” some of their statements, she understands “the emotion behind it.”
And she’s been vocal in her support of an at least temporary cease-fire, saying during her March speech in Selma that “given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate cease-fire” for at least six weeks.
Harris doesn’t have a long-standing relationship with Netanyahu in the same way Biden does, but she met with Israel’s Benny Gantz at the White House while he was serving on the country’s war cabinet in March. She also met with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog earlier this year on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
Abortion
Already the administration’s lead messenger on the central campaign issue of abortion rights, Harris has been consistently more boldly outspoken on the issue than Biden.
Before running for president in 2020, she went after crisis pregnancy centers as California attorney general and went viral for a line of questioning with then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, where she pressed him to name a single law that polices what men can do with their bodies.
Her 2020 platform included a proposal to pass a Reproductive Rights Act that would have taken affirmative steps to enforce Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court later overruled in 2022.
Since the Supreme Court’s decision affecting Roe, Harris has toured the country as bans went into place. She made history by being the first vice president to ever visit an abortion clinic in March — a move that demonstrated how loudly supportive of abortion rights she is — and delivered a fiery speech on then-GOP presidential candidate Ron Desantis’ home turf in Florida this spring when a six-week ban went into effect there.
She made it clear in her first rally on Tuesday that abortion rights would continue to be a central issue for her as a presidential candidate.
“We who believe in reproductive freedom will fight for a woman’s right to choose because one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do,” Harris said in a rally in Indiana on Wednesday, addressing the Zeta Phi Beta sorority.
That’s not to say Biden didn’t also make abortion rights a central tenet of his administration and campaign, said Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at University of California, Davis and abortion historian. However, she said, he was constrained by generational and religious differences that made Harris “the much more effective, passionate messenger on reproductive issues.”
Should Harris win in November, “I think there would be some differences in substance, really significant differences in tone, and then, maybe or maybe not, differences in outcome,” Ziegler said.
Outcomes — such as codifying Roe vs. Wade into law, going even further to also protect birth control or in-vitro fertilization, or pursuing further legal challenges to protect abortion rights — would depend primarily on how Democrats perform down the ballot in November and whether Harris has the opportunity to confirm any more justices to the Supreme Court.
Health care
In her remarks to campaign staff Monday, Harris said that her campaign will “fight to build a nation where every person has affordable health care.”
The Medicare for All plan that Harris proposed in 2020 would have covered all medically necessary services, including emergency room visits, doctor visits, vision, dental, hearing aids, mental health and substance use disorder treatment, and comprehensive reproductive health care services. The plan had a 10-year transition period.
Under Harris’ plan, Americans would have had a choice between the public Medicare for All plan and plans from private insurers that would have had to adhere to strict Medicare requirements on costs and benefits.
To pay for the program, she proposed charging an additional premium to households making above $100,000 per year, with a higher income threshold for those in higher-cost-of-living areas.
In 2020, Biden called for a less ambitious “Medicare for all who want it” public option plan. However, according to Roll Call, he hasn’t mentioned that public option since December of 2020 — before he took office.
Biden also previously suggested he would veto a Medicare for All bill, arguing that it would raise taxes for the middle class.
But the vice president’s past policy differences with Biden may not mean all that much for a Harris presidency.
“I wouldn’t expect it to change at all [from Biden’s agenda],” David Barker, a professor of government at American University, said. “Until there’s some indication that that’s politically realistic, I don’t think anybody’s going to even try.”
Barker added that smaller changes, similar to the $35 price cap on insulin for seniors on Medicare in the Inflation Reduction Act, is “the way they’ll continue” in a Harris administration.
Criminal justice
While Harris faced sharp criticism from the left during the 2020 primary for her background as a prosecutor, her platform that year contained a slate of ambitious reforms to the criminal justice system aimed at ending mass incarceration and fighting racial inequities.
Harris’ platform advocated to legalize marijuana and expunge some marijiuana-related convictions; end cash bail and mandatory minimums; eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine; and stop the use of private prisons and the death penalty.
Her criminal justice plan also sought to increase the Department of Justice’s oversight of police departments and limit them from acquiring certain kinds of military equipment. In a clip that has been circulated by Republicans, she also advocated for restoring the right of formerly-incarcerated people to vote and automatically expunging non-serious, non-violent offenses after five years.
The Biden administration’s most significant action on criminal justice came when it took action on marijuana, reducing federal criminal penalties for offenses relating to the drug and pardoning those with criminal charges for simple possession of marijuana.
While Harris’ 2020 platform went well beyond Biden’s on criminal justice, her recent remarks make no indication that it will be a major theme of her campaign. The issue went unmentioned in her speech at the campaign’s Wilmington, Delaware, headquarters on Monday.
(WASHINGTON) — Against the backdrop of the U.S. Capitol at dusk, freed American Paul Whelan, who just completed a government resettlement program in Texas following his return from wrongful detainment in Russia, thanked the lawmakers who worked to help secure his release.
Whelan praised a “bipartisan effort that brought me home” after spending the day meeting with lawmakers who took up his case from his home state of Michigan and elsewhere.
“The Michigan delegation brought me home here,” he said.
“You know, it was five years, seven months and five days,” he added of his time in Russian custody. “I counted each one of them.”
The former Marine revealed he spent the final five days in the Russian prison in solitary confinement.
“I couldn’t leave my cell,” he said, “but I made it home.”
Whelan wouldn’t preview what’s next for him — offering only that he needs a new car and that suddenly he’s in a place with electric and driverless vehicles — but said he’s involved in discussions over how to support other wrongfully detained Americans around the world.
“We’re coming for you,” Whelan said to those Americans. “The United States is not going to let people like me, Marc [Fogel], Trevor [Reed], Brittney [Griner, who was released in December 2022] languish in foreign prisons. It might take time, but we’re coming for them and everybody else.”
Whelan acknowledged the reporters he recognized by name or face, recalling the precise month he spoke with them via a smuggled phone from prison. He thanked them for reporting on his case.
He also thanked “all of the people that work for agencies that I will never meet, people that I will never know, their staff members, everyone that’s been involved at every level.”
Rep. Haley Stevens, who represents Whelan’s district in Congress, told ABC News she expects to lean on him for the complex policymaking to mitigate foreign detentions like his.
“Well, he might not know it, but I plan to be in touch with him for a very long time to come, as long as he’ll welcome it, because there’s a lot to learn from his experience,” she said.
She noted that Whelan’s case was “the first one” of a series of high-profile detentions in Russia, including Griner and Evan Gershkovich, and it “certainly changed the relationship that the United States had with Russia, even before the war in Ukraine began.”
“Our message to Russia is that when it comes to your shenanigans and your illegal and unjust and unlawful behavior, we, as the United States of America, are united. We will fight for our people,” she said. “We will bring them home, and we will win.”
Whelan returned to the United States on Aug. 2 after five-and-a-half years in a Russian penal colony.
Russian authorities released Whelan, as well as American journalists Gershkovic and Alsu Kurmasheva, in a multi-country deal that freed eight Russian prisoners abroad. The 26-person swap was the largest between the U.S. and Russia since the Cold War.
Whelan was arrested in Moscow in 2019 on charges of espionage and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Whelan, who frequently visited the city, was deemed as wrongfully detained by the U.S. Department of State.
The former Marine wasn’t the only former Russian captive on Capitol Hill Tuesday. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a dual Russian-British national whose release was secured by the U.S., met with lawmakers. Kara-Murza was imprisoned in Russia for two years for his opposition to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.