Doug Emhoff blasts Gov. Sanders’ remarks about Harris not having biological children
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(NEW YORK) — Second gentleman Doug Emhoff blasted remarks made by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who said Vice President Kamala Harris “doesn’t have anything to keep her humble” because she does not have biological children.
“We know that all parents, no matter how you become one, make the same sacrifices and revel in the same joys of raising children as any parent anywhere,” Emhoff defended his wife while speaking at a campaign event in Brooklyn, New York, Wednesday evening.
“As if keeping women humble, whether you have children or not, is something we should strive for. It is not,” the second gentleman said. “Women in this country will never humble themselves before Donald Trump.”
Emhoff referred to Sanders’ comment as “unbelievable,” and he expressed his appreciation for his wife, ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff, and their “big, beautiful, blessed family.”
Harris is the stepmom to Cole and Ella Emhoff, her husband’s children from his first marriage.
Kerstin Emhoff jumped to Harris’ defense as well, responding to a video of Sanders on X.
“Kamala Harris has spent her entire career working for the people, ALL families. That keeps you pretty humble,” she wrote Tuesday.
Sanders had been speaking at a Michigan town hall with former President Donald Trump on Tuesday when she made the comments. “So my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble,” she said.
During a visit Wednesday to a Bitcoin bar in Greenwich Village, New York, Trump was asked about Sanders’ remarks and whether Harris should be attacked for not having biological children.
“Well, I just don’t know what I think about it, you know,” Trump said during the event.
Ohio Sen. JD Vance previously commented on Harris and other women for not having children with his well-known “childless cat ladies” comment.
In the 2021 clip, which only recently resurfaced, Vance accused Harris and the Democrats of being “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
There has been much backlash to Vance’s remark, and some have even made mocked the comment by making it their own. Most famously, Taylor Swift signed her endorsement for Harris as a “childless cat lady.”
ABC News’ Will McDuffie, Gabriella Abdul-Hakim, Fritz Farrow, and Chris Donovan contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — A group of more than 30 current and former Republican officials filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday condemning a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming medical care for trans youth.
“States have no business overruling the decisions of fit parents who make an informed medical choice for their children that is supported by their doctors,” the filing reads.
The Supreme Court is preparing to take up a constitutional challenge to the law, which restricts access to puberty blockers, hormone therapies and surgeries specifically for the purpose of gender transitioning for people under the age of 18. The law does not restrict this care for non-transgender patients.
At least 25 states have passed similar bans on gender-affirming medical care.
The Republican signatories include representatives from state legislatures, the George W. Bush administration, as well as the John McCain and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns. It also includes Jordan Willow Evans, the nation’s first openly transgender elected Republican.
The signatories argue that the law is “nothing less than ‘a vast government overreach,’” quoting former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, who vetoed a gender-confirming medical care ban for transgender youths in his state.
Hutchinson’s veto was followed by a veto from Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine against his state’s own proposed gender-affirming care ban. Both Hutchinson’s and DeWine’s vetoes were overridden by their respective state legislature.
Republicans and political conservatives in opposition to the Tennessee law say they are against the law because of their values of limited government and respect for families – “in particular, the rights of parents to make weighty decisions about the upbringing and medical care of their own children.”
“Parents want their children to be safe, happy and healthy. Parents of transgender children are no different,” the filing reads. “Reasonable people can disagree about what is best for kids, but the question presented here is who makes that decision: their parents or government bureaucrats?”
The filing also quotes Republican former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie – whose former staff is also represented among the amicus brief signatories.
On the presidential campaign trail in 2023, Christie said that “parents are the people who are best positioned to make these judgments” and “the government should [n]ever be stepping into the place of the parents.”
Tennessee Republican lawmakers in favor of trans care bans have defended the law in light of the impending Supreme Court case, often arguing that children should wait to receive care until they are adults.
“Tennessee is committed to protecting children from permanent, life-altering decisions,” Gov. Bill Lee said in an April 2023 post on the social media platform X after the Justice Department argued the law violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
In a statement on the Supreme Court case, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti also defended the law: “We fought hard to defend Tennessee’s law protecting kids from irreversible gender treatments and secured a thoughtful and well-reasoned opinion from the 6th Circuit.”
He continued, “I look forward to finishing the fight in the United States Supreme Court. This case will bring much-needed clarity to whether the Constitution contains special protections for gender identity.”
The filing notes people and medical professionals believe that it endangers children with gender dysphoria not to provide them with gender-affirming care.
Major national medical associations — including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and more than 20 others — agree that gender-affirming care is safe, effective, beneficial and medically necessary.
Research has found that hormone therapy can improve the mental health of transgender adolescents and teenagers, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, reducing depression and anxiety and increasing life satisfaction.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris unveiled a sweeping economic agenda on Friday, vowing to ease inflation, fix the housing market and slash taxes for middle-income families.
The plans include eye-catching proposals such as a ban on grocery price gouging and a $25,000 subsidy for first-time homebuyers.
Economists who spoke to ABC News offered up a mixed assessment of the newly released agenda. Some experts lauded the effort to slow rising costs and restrain corporate power in key sectors, while others criticized what they consider a misguided attempt to override market forces that risks worsening the nation’s debt.
Less than three months before the presidential election, the economy tops lists of voter concerns. Growth is slowing but remains solid. Price increases have cooled dramatically but remain higher than the Federal Reserve’s target level.
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Here’s what to know about how economists assess three key pillars of Harris’ economic plan: fighting inflation, recalibrating the housing market and cutting taxes for families.
Fighting inflation
The campaign aims to rein in price increases for everything from groceries to prescription drugs to homes.
Harris points to the market power of large corporations as a key cause of rapid price increases for essential goods, saying companies use their outsized role in a given market to raise prices without fear of a competitor offering a comparable product at a more affordable price. Consumers, the Harris campaign says, are left with nowhere to turn.
The grocery industry exemplifies the damage caused by mega corporations, according to the campaign. “Extreme consolidation in the food industry has led to higher prices that account for a large part of higher grocery bills,” the campaign said in a statement on Friday.
Grocery store profit margins surged in 2021 and rose even higher two years later, even after price increases had begun to cool, a Federal Trade Commission study in March showed.
To control the price hikes, Harris proposed a federal ban on price gouging for food and groceries. While details remain limited, the plan could resemble price-gouging bans in place in 37 states, which prohibit a sudden spike in prices for scarce goods.
Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collective, in a statement on Friday echoed the Harris campaign’s criticism of the broken market for groceries.
“Price gouging, price fixing, and just plain profiteering are rampant in the food and grocery sector,” Owens said. “There is still more the government can do to reduce food and grocery concentration and stop the cheating that is costing families dearly.”
Some economists, however, rejected the notion of corporate power as an important cause of inflation, saying a limit on price hikes could result in shortages of goods.
“Most of the inflation over the past few years has been caused by increases in costs,” Steven Hamilton, a professor of economics at George Washington University, told ABC News. Hamilton acknowledged that price increases for some groceries may owe to corporate concentration, but said it doesn’t stand as a primary cause of overall inflation.
“You have to be careful not to cherry pick,” Hamilton said.
Michael Jones, an economics professor at the University of Cincinnati, said a government-imposed ceiling on prices could cause stores to run out of goods in times of scarcity.
“If there’s a restriction on the prices that companies can charge for products, they simply won’t supply them,” Jones told ABC News.
Fixing the housing market
In recent years, the housing market has suffered from a convergence of high mortgage rates and elevated home prices, shutting out prospective buyers with high costs.
The Harris campaign proposed restoring affordability through a combination of boosting home supply and easing the price pressures for some homebuyers.
Plans to grow the supply of homes include a tax incentive for companies that build starter homes and affordable rental homes, the Harris campaign said. The campaign’s plans to aid buyers feature a $25,000 subsidy for first-time homebuyers.
Economists who spoke to ABC News lauded the Harris campaign’s effort to boost housing supply, but offered differing opinions about the support for homebuyers.
“The reason that housing prices have gone up in most places in America is that supply is limited,” Hamilton, of George Washington University, told ABC News. “That commitment to increase supply is rare among politicians but it’s something that economists should praise.
Some economists said the subsidies for homebuyers threaten to undermine the price cuts achieved through additional supply. If prospective buyers know they’ll receive a subsidy of $25,000 from the government, they’ll boost their asking price by that amount, said Jones, of the University of Cincinnati. As a result, he added, home prices will rise.
“If they have $25,000 more to spend on a house, they’ll submit bids up to $25,000 higher for the home,” Jones said. “That policy in particular is a bad idea because it won’t bring the price of housing down.”
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said the combination of supply growth and homebuyer support could work effectively as long as Harris focuses on boosting supply before she bolsters consumers.
“You’ve got to put the horse before the cart,” Zandi said. “It’s a matter of timing.”
Cutting taxes for middle-class families
The Harris campaign said it aims to keep some money in middle-class consumers’ pockets by reducing their tax burden.
The plans include a restoration of the expanded child tax credit of $3,600 per child that expired in 2022. Harris also proposed an additional, new $6,000 child tax credit for families with a child in the first year of life.
The tax cuts for families drew wide support from economists who spoke to ABC News, though some emphasized the importance of accompanying those proposals with revenue-raising measures that will offset the tax reductions.
“A child tax credit expansion is fantastic and I would fully support it, as long as they find way to pay for it,” said Hamilton, of George Washington University. “This is a policy targeted toward people who really need it, and families who really need it.”
For its part, the Harris campaign said on Friday that it would safeguard the federal government’s financial health, in part by increasing taxes on wealthy individuals as a means of offsetting middle-class tax cuts.
Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president, will “fulfill their commitment to fiscal responsibility, including by asking the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share,” the campaign said.
Zandi, of Moody’s Analytics, voiced support for the tax cut but also urged caution about the potential loss of tax revenue. If the tax credits end up adding to the national debt, it would undermine the savings for consumers by risking an increase in overall inflation.
“I don’t think you can do anything without it being paid for,” Zandi said. “That would be counterproductive.”
(WASHINGTON) — Special counsel Jack Smith has outlined new details of former President Donald Trump and his allies’ sweeping and “increasingly desperate” efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, in a blockbuster court filing Wednesday aimed at defending Smith’s prosecution of Trump following the Supreme Court’s July immunity ruling.
Trump intentionally lied to the public, state election officials, and his own vice president in an effort to cling to power after losing the election, while privately describing some of the claims of election fraud as “crazy,” prosecutors alleged in the 165-page filing.
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the filing said. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost.”
When Trump’s effort to overturn the election through lawsuits and fraudulent electors failed to change the outcome of the election, prosecutors allege that the former president fomented violence, with prosecutors describing Trump as directly responsible for “the tinderbox that he purposely ignited on January 6.”
“The defendant also knew that he had only one last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as President: the large and angry crowd standing in front of him. So for more than an hour, the defendant delivered a speech designed to inflame his supporters and motivate them to march to the Capitol,” Smith wrote.
The lengthy filing — which includes an 80-page summary of the evidence gathered by investigators — outlines multiple instances in which Trump allegedly heard from advisers who disproved his allegations, yet continued to spread his claims of outcome-determinative voter fraud, prosecutors said.
“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell,” Trump allegedly told members of his family following the 2020 election, the filing said.
In a statement, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said the release of the filing was an attempt to interfere with the upcoming election following Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.
“This entire case is a partisan, Unconstitutional Witch Hunt that should be dismissed entirely,” Cheung said.
In her order allowing the redacted filing to become public, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who has been overseeing the case, addressed the defense’s accusations of partisan bias.
“Defendant’s opposition brief repeatedly accuses the Government of bad-faith partisan bias,” the judge wrote. “These accusations, for which Defendant provides no support, continue a pattern of defense filings focusing on political rhetoric rather than addressing the legal issues at hand.”
“Not only is that focus unresponsive and unhelpful to the court, but it is also unbefitting of experienced defense counsel and undermining of the judicial proceedings in this case,” Judge Chutkan wrote. “Future filings should be directed to the issues before the court.”
According to prosecutors, Trump “laid the groundwork for his crimes well before” 2020’s Election Day, including by sowing doubt among his supporters and planning to declare victory immediately, despite multiple advisers telling him that the results were unlikely to be finalized on Election Day.
Prosecutors allege that Trump and his allies “sought to create chaos” at polling places — including one instance when a campaign employee encouraged a colleague to “make them riot” at an ongoing vote count in Detroit — which the former president later used to support his claims of voter fraud.
“The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud,” the filing said.
In addition to outlining the instances when Trump was directly corrected about his allegations of voter fraud, the filing said Trump privately called allegations of voter fraud made by his lawyer Sidney Powell as “crazy” — despite employing similar arguments to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, prosecutors allege.
Trump last year pleaded not guilty to federal charges of undertaking a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election in order to remain in power. Wednesday’s filing comes at a pivotal moment in the case, as Judge Chutkan is set to begin considering whether any of the allegations included in the government’s case are protected by presidential immunity after the Supreme Court ruled in a blockbuster decision that Trump is entitled to immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts undertaken while in office.
In August, Smith filed a pared-down indictment that removed allegations likely to have been considered official acts — including Trump’s interactions with Justice Department officials to interfere with the election — while still charging the former president with the same four criminal counts he originally faced. Last week, Smith filed a sealed brief seeking to justify the superseding indictment, then sought to file a redacted version for public release.
Trump’s lawyers opposed Wednesday’s lengthy filing — which they described as “tantamount to a premature and improper Special Counsel report” — and argued that public release of the allegations would improperly influence the election and violate Department of Justice policies. Judge Chutkan — who has long stated that the election does not play a factor in her decision making — ordered the filing be publicly released Wednesday.
In justifying his case against Trump, Smith alleged that Trump acted as an office-seeker rather than an officeholder when he committed crimes, and that he “must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen.”
“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Wednesday’s filing said.
