Harris, pressed on how she’d get economic plan through Congress, suggests there might be a path
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris indicated in a “60 Minutes” interview out Monday that she could get her economic policies through a Republican-controlled Congress, despite the potential for opposition from Republican lawmakers to her proposed tax breaks that drive up the federal deficit.
In a clip of the interview released Monday, “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker pressed Harris on how she would pay for the policies, which include tax breaks for small business owners, parents and first-time homebuyers.
“How are you going to get this through Congress?” Whitaker asked.
“You know, when you talk quietly with a lot of folks in Congress, they know exactly what I’m talking about because their constituents know exactly what I’m talking about; their constituents are those firefighters and teachers and nurses,” the vice president responded.
The “60 Minutes” interview, which will air in full Monday night, is the second time in recent weeks Harris has been asked to describe how she would fund her policies.
MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle asked her in an interview last month, “If you can’t raise corporate taxes, or if GOP takes control of the Senate, where do you get the money to do that?”
“Well, but we’re going to have to raise corporate taxes. And we’re going to have to raise — we’re going to have to make sure that the biggest corporations and billionaires pay their fair share,” answered Harris.
The vice president speaks often about her economic plans — a key voter issue in the election — while on the campaign trail, too. Her plans are geared toward helping working-class Americans as she tries to gain ground on an issue, which surveys suggest former President Donald Trump is winning.
In an economics-focused speech last month in Pittsburgh, Harris touted a “pragmatic” vision for the economy, saying she would be “grounded in my fundamental values of fairness, dignity and opportunity.”
Harris, though, is likely to face continuing questions about her plans to fund her ideas.
In another pre-released exceprt of the “60 Minutes” interview, Whitaker challenged Harris on whether Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanahu is “listening” to the Biden administration’s urges to defuse tensions in the Middle East.
“Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” Harris said.
Asked if the United States has “a real close ally in Prime Minister Netanyahu,” Harris responded, “I think, with all due respect, the better question is: do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people? And the answer to that question is yes.”
Harris’ “60 Minutes” interview is part of a flurry of interviews she has set for this week, including with “The View,” “The Howard Stern Show” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” a senior campaign official said.
Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, also has a media blitz planned this week with stops at “Jimmy Kimmel Live” as well as being part of the “60 Minutes” interview.
Both Harris and Walz will spend time campaigning out West this week with stops in Nevada and Arizona, according to the senior campaign official.
(CHICAGO) — Democrats have made conservatives’ controversial Project 2025 and its education agenda a weapon in their attacks against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention.
Dismantling the Department of Education is a key issue for conservatives this election season and is mentioned in the 922-page playbook for the next conservative president. And while Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, it aligns in many ways with his Agenda 47 platform.
President Joe Biden slammed the Republican vision for education as he addressed the Democratic National Convention on Monday night.
“Donald Trump, and his Republican friends, they not only can’t think, they can’t read very well,” Biden said, adding,”Seriously, think about it. Look at their Project 2025. They want to do away with the Department of Education.”
Michelle Obama touched on the subject in her speech the following night: “Shutting down the Department of Education, banning our books — none of that will prepare our kids for the future.”
Trump reiterated his plan for education in his wide-ranging X Spaces interview last week with Elon Musk.
“I want to close up the Department of Education [and] move education back to the states,” Trump told Musk’s more than one million listeners, claiming that the U.S. had fallen to the bottom of rankings among other countries and that states do a better job educating their children without federal mandates.
The U.S. is not ranked at the bottom, as Trump claimed, but due to historic learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is close to the bottom half in subjects like math in the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Nearly a third of U.S. students also ended last school year behind grade level in at least one academic subject, according to new data released by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
It’s unclear whether the former president would close the agency and redistribute its funding to states or stop funding it and close it altogether. ABC News has reached out to the Trump campaign but didn’t receive a response by time of publication.
Critics of the plan say it would hurt mostly small, rural school systems, many of them in red states.
In an interview with the nonprofit More Perfect Union, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said he would defend public education against defunding because it would exacerbate the “haves and the have-nots.” An Education Department official warned that if the agency were shuttered, states would lose a “large chunk” of funding from the feds and state and local governments — on average about 10%. State and local governments make up roughly 90% of public school funding.
Education finance expert Jess Gartner said school districts with the “highest need” students could take a devastating blow if the federal agency’s funding was cut because funding for school districts isn’t always equally distributed.
“Those targeted funds were being targeted for a reason,” Gartner said.
‘I can’t find the word ‘education’ in [the Constitution]’
House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., is one of the most vocal opponents of the department. She raises caregivers’ and local school board members’ concerns that they shouldn’t have to “co-parent” with the government.
Conservatives also reject what they characterize as bureaucrats infusing culture war topics into their kids’ school curriculums.
Foxx argued it’s unconstitutional for the government to handle state education issues in the first place.
“I can’t find the word ‘education’ in there [the Constitution] as one of the duties and responsibilities of Congress or the federal government,” Foxx told ABC News.
That ideology gives way for Trump to work with Foxx and congressional Republicans to pass a department closure if he wins the White House and Republicans maintain control of the House and take over the Senate in November, according to Arnold Ventures Director of Higher Education Clare McCann.
“Congress created the Department of Education,” McCann told ABC News, adding, “Congress could uncreate it if they wanted.”
In theory, McCann said, Trump could make the shift with congressional approval but it’s unlikely it would happen immediately. There would need to be a support system to dole out the money to states, but that’s something the department would be equipped to do.
“There’s a reason the Department of Education was created and it was to have this kind of in-house expertise and policy background on these issues,” McCann said. “The civil servants who work at the Department of Education are true experts in the field,” she added.
Arkansas moves against ‘indoctrinating’ students
Former Trump White House press secretary Sarah Sanders has pushed for conservative education reform since becoming the first woman elected as the state’s governor in 2022. Last year, she signed into law the state’s LEARNS Act, which calls for raising minimum teacher salaries, introducing universal pre-K, banning teaching on “gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual reproduction” before fifth grade and banning curriculum that would “indoctrinate students with ideologies, such as Critical Race Theory.”
It also instituted a universal voucher program for so-called “school choice,” which is also similar to plans in Trump’s Agenda 47 and Project 2025.
Superintendent of the Little Rock School District Jermall Wright said abolishing the Department of Education would be “catastrophic.”
Wright, who cited friction with the school board in announcing last week he was stepping down from his position after two years on the job, said such an action would hinder title and grant funding meant to supplement state funding. He also fears it would strip states of Title I funding for low-income and disadvantaged students as well as McKinney-Vento funds, which includes support for the unhoused and transient populations.
“We rely on those additional funds to provide, you know, an array of services and supports for students and families,” Wright told ABC News. “The face of homelessness has changed. It’s not just, you know, people who are living on streets. We have extremely mobile families. They move from apartments to apartments, hotels, motels, etc. We have children who may live with family members that are not their biological parents. All those types of situations.”
Before Little Rock, Wright led the Mississippi Achievement School District — which encompasses two smaller districts totaling about 5,000 students in the rural Mississippi Delta. He said he saw firsthand the amount of federal aid some districts in the poorest state in the nation rely on.
“In those small rural districts, the majority of our funding came from federal funds, which I’d never experienced that a day before in any place that I had worked,” he said, adding, “Those districts wouldn’t be able to survive, let alone, you just can’t function.”
Wright also said the federal agency plays an essential role in overseeing states’ civil rights issues.
An impact on vulnerable students
That’s a concern in other states like California, where education advocates worry abolishing the department would have an impact on vulnerable students and students with disabilities as well as general learning outcomes for students and teachers.
“There’s a critical role for the U.S. Department of Education to support states in thinking about how to meet the needs of student groups who either have been marginalized, underserved, or for whom we really haven’t had the opportunity to think about how best to meet their needs,” said Sarah Lillis, California executive director for Teach Plus.
Gartner, the education finance expert, said much of this conversation is dependent on economic opportunity, not location.
“There are very wealthy districts in California and there are very poor districts in California [and everywhere else],” Gartner told ABC News. “Wealthy districts aren’t going to be impacted very much by their Title I money being cut. They’re going to go out and pass a bond and raise that money – and then some – locally in two days. It’s the poor, rural district that’s going to be devastated by that and have no recourse to fill that gap.”
Due to their emphasis on local control, states like Texas with strong economies would virtually be unaffected, according to state policy experts.
Others say they don’t need the feds’ help.
Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Debbie Critchfield said the state doesn’t look to the U.S. Department of Education for guidance on education policy. She told ABC News that she’s fine with abolishing the agency.
“We are making decisions about education focused on our own state,” Critchfield told ABC News, adding, “It is very rare that we’re reaching out to the federal government to help us know what initiatives and goals we want to have here for our kids in Idaho.”
Critchfield believes shuttering the department would have “little impact” on her state.
“We don’t look to them [the Department of Education] to say what should we be working on,” Critchfield said. “I’m talking to leaders in the state, local school boards, parents in our state, they’re the ones telling me what I should be focused on. Outside of [the Department of Education] watchdogging, the influence on outcomes just isn’t there.”
(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump is set to hold a news conference Thursday afternoon at his Bedminster golf club — his second in a week — as the campaign continues to pressure Vice President Kamala Harris to do interviews and answer reporter questions.
“She refuses to do any interviews or press conferences, almost 30 days now, she has not done an interview,” Trump said Wednesday in North Carolina. “You know why she hasn’t done an interview? Because she’s not smart. She’s not intelligent,” he said.
His campaign says she’s trying to “duck and hide” from the news media.
The 4:30 p.m. news conference follows one that Trump held at his Mar-a-Lago estate last Thursday, fielding questions for more than an hour on a range of topics including his recent attacks on Harris, immigration and reproductive rights.
During the long and, at times, rambling exchange with reporters, Trump often pushed false claims on several topics, including the outcome of the 2020 election and size of the crowd at his Jan. 6, 2021, rally before the attacks on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
Trump’s recent news conferences appear to be part of the campaign’s attempt to draw a contrast between the two candidates.
“She hasn’t done an interview — she can’t do an interview,” Trump claimed during his Mar-a-Lago press conference last week.
He added that he “look[s] forward to the debates” as a way to “set the record straight.”
The Harris campaign has been using Trump’s news conferences to highlight flubs he has made and criticize policies he advocates.
“Trump did the only thing he knows how to do — he went out and lied, made up stories, mixed up dates, attacked the media, and, overall, reminded Americans that he is a deeply unwell man,” the Harris campaign said in a statement reacting to Trump’s news conference.
During her time out on the campaign trail since announcing her White House bid, Harris has held a few exchanges with reporters aboard Air Force Two and answered a few shouted questions; however, her campaign says she will participate in a sit-down interview before the end of the month.
“We will commit to directly engage with the voters that are actually gonna decide this election and that is gonna be complete with rallies, with sit-down interviews, with press conferences, with all the digital assets we have at our disposal,” Michael Tyler, communications director for the Harris-Walz campaign, said on CNN Wednesday when pressed multiple times to commit to press conferences and media interviews.
Though she hasn’t made herself as available to the media as the former president, Harris did spend the week with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, crisscrossing the country visiting battleground states.
Trump just visited the solidly conservative state of Montana to stump for GOP Senate candidate Tim Sheehy last week, and is holding a rally in battleground Pennsylvania over the weekend.
(NEW YORK) — New York City Mayor Eric Adams pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan federal court Friday to federal charges related to an alleged conspiracy with Turkish nationals that landed him lavish gifts in exchange for beneficial treatment.
“I am not guilty your honor,” Adams told the judge.
The one-time police captain listened as Magistrate Judge Katharine Parker informed Adams of his rights. Asked if he understood those rights, Adams replied, “Yes, I do, your honor.”
Federal prosecutors accused Adams of accepting more than $100,000 in improper benefits over nearly a decade, many of which came in the form of flight upgrades and stays in luxury hotels, none of which were publicly divulged as required.
The indictment also alleged Adams and a staffer knowingly worked with Turkish nationals to send foreign money to straw donors for his mayoral campaign, and used that money to rake in over $10 million from New York City’s matching funds program.
Adams, 64, who is the first sitting New York City mayor to be criminally charged, has denied the allegations and vowed to fight the charges, despite rising calls for him to step down. Longtime Rep. Jerry Nadler, whose district covers central Manhattan, was the latest New York official to call for Adams to step down Friday.
Adams was released on his own recognizance and ordered to have no contact with witnesses or anyone named in the indictment. He is allowed to have contact with staff members or relatives who may have knowledge of the fact pattern as long as they do not discuss the case.
The mayor did not make any statements after the arraignment, but gave a thumbs up to the media. His attorney, Alex Spiro, told reporters after the hearing that it was “not a real case.”
He claimed prosecutors did not have any evidence against his client, and laid blame on an unidentified staff member mentioned in the indictment who allegedly dealt with the Turkish nationals. Spiro claimed the staffer lied to prosecutors.
“There are no emails or text messages or corroboration that the mayor had anything to do with these allegations,” Spiro said.
Adams will return to court next week for an initial conference before the district judge who will oversee the case.
“We will be filing a motion to dismiss on Wednesday,” Spiro said.
Prior to his arraignment, Adams was fingerprinted and photographed and basic pedigree information was taken during processing.
The 57-page indictment had several details about Adams’ alleged corruption that dated back to his time as Brooklyn borough president.
The indictment included several text messages from an unidentified Adams staff member and several unidentified Turkish business persons and an unidentified Turkish government official, who provided gifts such as first-class flights and stays at luxurious hotels in Turkey and other locations.
The indictment also claimed a Turkish government official tried to open a new high-rise building in Manhattan in 2021 that would house Turkey’s consulate and pushed Adams to speed up the construction permits. Despite warnings from New York City fire safety professionals, Adams pressured the fire department to open the building and solicited more travel gifts, according to prosecutors.
The indictment followed a nearly yearlong investigation that included probes into Adams’ closest allies. Federal agents have searched and seized electronics from several officials, including former NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban, who resigned shortly after the search, and deputy mayors Phil Banks and Sheena Wright.
No other New York City official has been charged in connection with Adams’ allegations. The investigation is ongoing.