RFK Jr. recently tried to set up meeting with Harris
(WASHINGTON) — Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently sought a meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris, according to multiple people familiar with the outreach.
Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, Kennedy’s campaign manager, told ABC News that she and Kennedy reached out to the Harris team but have yet to hear back.
The outreach was the latest in a monthslong and fruitless effort by the Kennedy campaign to speak with top Democrats, including President Joe Biden when he sat atop the Democratic ticket, Fox Kennedy told ABC.
However, the most recent attempts to meet with Harris appear to have carried extra meaning: the Washington Post reported Wednesday that Kennedy wanted to discuss the possibility of serving in Harris’ cabinet in exchange for an endorsement to help her over the finish line this fall.
Fox Kennedy did not dispute the details of the story and told ABC News, “Bobby has always been willing to meet with both parties to discuss the possibility of a unity government.”
Democrats on Wednesday all but dismissed the possibility of working out a deal with Kennedy, whose poll numbers have steadily dipped throughout the summer.
“No one has any intention of negotiating with a MAGA-funded fringe candidate who has sought out a job with Donald Trump in exchange for an endorsement,” said Lis Smith, an advisor to the Democratic National Committee.
Kennedy has met multiple times with Republican nominee Donald Trump, including an in-person meeting in Milwaukee last month where the men discussed possible roles for Kennedy in a Trump administration, as ABC News previously reported.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign kicked off a weekslong 50-stop “reproductive freedom bus tour” across battleground states in West Palm Beach, Florida — former President Donald Trump’s backyard — on Tuesday.
The campaign said “reproductive rights storytellers” will join campaign surrogates along the route to help emphasize the split screen on the issue between the Harris-Walz campaign and Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance.
Women’s reproductive rights are a key voter issue driving suburban women to the polls, and has been a spotlight since the Supreme Court overruled the constitutional right to abortion that had been the law nationwide for almost 50 years.
“Our campaign is hitting the road to meet voters in their communities, underscore the stakes of this election for reproductive freedom, and present them with the Harris-Walz ticket’s vision to move our country forward, which stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s plans to drag us back,” Harris-Walz Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote in a statement.
The bus tour began just days after Trump announced a sweeping new policy proposal on in vitro fertilization, promising to make the costly treatments free. The former president has not yet provided any specific details about how he would fund the initiative.
Trump’s initiative is seen as a way to court those suburban women as November approaches.
On a phone call with reporters on Friday, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has been campaigning for Harris, said “American women are not stupid” and that they understand the promise is coming from Trump, who has consistently bragged about being responsible for the Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade.
“It was Donald Trump who opened the door for any extremist judge or extremist state legislature to ban IVF without legal protection for abortion and IVF,” Warren said.
Tuesday’s bus tour kicked off in West Palm Beach — not far from Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago.
“Now my friends, I ask you, what better place to kick off the Harris/Walz reproductive freedom bus tour than in Donald Trump’s backyard?” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, said.
Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar spoke at the event and called on women to have their voices heard.
“Americans have shown us time and time again that they will not tolerate a country where our daughters have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers, and they believe that women have the right to make their own health care decisions and not politicians,” Klobuchar said.
Chavez Rodriguez said the campaign is mobilizing around women’s reproductive rights.
“Today, by launching this bus tour, we are reminding Trump of the fact that by pulling our reproductive freedom and putting it on the ballot, he is going to have an incredible amount of energy and organizing that he is going to have to contend with.”
Later in the bus tour, there will be appearances from reproductive rights advocates Amanda Zurawski, Hadley Duvall and Kaitlyn Joshua throughout the tour as well, according to the campaign.
So far, the Harris-Walz campaign already has events scheduled in Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Georgia for the bus tour — with more stops scheduled throughout the fall.
This election cycle, seven states, including the critical battleground states of Arizona and Nevada, will vote on abortion-related ballot initiatives in November.
According to a New York Times/Siena Poll released in August, abortion was a top-three issue among all registered voters in swing states with 14% of registered voters saying it was the most important issue in deciding their vote this November.
Trump, whose stance on abortion has wavered at times over the past year, recently criticized Florida’s six-week abortion ban.
“I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” he said to NBC News last month.
His campaign attempted to walk back that comment before Trump clarified that he’ll be voting “no” on Florida’s Amendment 4 — also known as the “Right to Abortion Initiative” — come November, despite continuing to claim that a ban at six weeks is “too short.”
This isn’t Harris’ first time hitting the campaign trail to focus on reproductive rights. She had already been tapped to lead reproductive rights discussions under President Joe Biden’s former campaign. In January, she embarked on a “reproductive freedom tour” on the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, making stops in Florida and Arizona.
(WASHINGTON) — Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said there will be a bipartisan, independent review of the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump.
The independent review will be made up of four people: former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano; Frances Townsend, the former Homeland Security adviser to President George W. Bush; Mark Filip, a former federal judge and deputy attorney general to President George W. Bush; and David Mitchell, the former superintendent of Maryland State Police and former Secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Homeland Security for the State of Delaware.
Mayorkas said he could invite additional experts to join the panel in the coming days.
The group will have 45 days to review the policies and procedures of the Secret Service before, during and after the rally on July 13.
“All Americans share a concern about the safety of our public officials,” members of the independent review panel said in a joint statement. “We formed this bipartisan group to quickly identify improvements the U.S. Secret Service can implement to enhance their work. We must all work together to ensure events like July 13 do not happen again.”
Mayorkas said his department is committed to being transparent with the findings.
Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle is set to testify Monday before the House Oversight Committee.
(MILWAUKEE, W.I. ) — Speakers at the Republican National Convention this week have faulted the Biden administration for putting the nation at risk from threats that include criminals, illicit drugs — and high prices.
“American families have been crushed by inflation,” Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers told the audience in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, described the “silent creep of inflation unleashed by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
Some economists who spoke to ABC News took issue with the blame placed on President Joe Biden as an overstatement of his role in the price spike. Instead, they said, the bout of rapidly rising prices emerged from a supply shortage imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and exacerbated by the Russia-Ukraine war.
Pandemic-era spending measures enacted by former President Donald Trump and Biden also contributed to the price spike, the economists added, but they differed on the share of responsibility that should be apportioned to each of the major party candidates.
“There’s a long list of reasons for the high inflation. At the top of the list is the pandemic and the Russian war,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told ABC News.
Some of the inflation owes to the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan signed by Biden in 2021, Zandi said. But, he added, “It’s at the bottom of the list.”
The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Price increases have slowed significantly from a peak of more than 9% in June 2022, though inflation remains a percentage point higher than the Fed’s target rate of 2%. Even after that progress made in the inflation fight, cumulative price increases during the Biden administration continue to take a toll on consumers, especially the rise in costs for essential goods like food and gas.
Like so many economic problems, inflation emerged due to an imbalance between supply and demand.
Hundreds of millions across the globe facing lockdowns replaced restaurant expenditures with online orders of couches and exercise bikes. But the demand for goods and labor far outpaced supply, as COVID-related bottlenecks slowed delivery times and infection fears kept workers on the sidelines.
“The most important factor for inflation is the recovery from the pandemic,” Jeffrey Frankel, an economist at Harvard University, told ABC News. “The process of coming back took longer than expected, in particular the supply constraints.”
To supercharge the recovery, Trump and Biden enacted economic stimulus meant to support people who’d lost their jobs or faced other financial hardship. That stimulus helped bring about a speedy economic recovery from the March 2020 downturn, triggering a surge in demand and a blitz of hiring.
With too many dollars chasing too few goods, prices skyrocketed.
“Both Trump and Biden contributed to the fiscal stimulus that fed into the inflation,” George Selgin, senior fellow and director emeritus of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the libertarian Cato Institute, told ABC News.
Jason Furman, a professor at Harvard University and former economic adviser to President Barack Obama, estimated that Biden’s American Rescue Plan added between 1 percentage point and 4 percentage points to the inflation rate in 2021, Roll Call reported. Michael Strain, of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, estimated that the legislation added 3 percentage points to inflation.
“It was irresponsible to do stimulus when the economy was well on its way to recovery,” Peter Morici, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s School of Business told ABC News, faulting Biden’s stimulus more than Trump’s because Biden’s measure came when the economy was already heating up.
“Blame is falling where it’s due,” Morici added. “Biden does bear responsibility for the endurance of Covid inflation.”
Zandi, of Moody’s Analytics, disagreed. The measure did little to raise prices but helped sustain the strong job gains and robust economic performance that followed, he said. As far as inflation goes, Zandi added, “The American Rescue Plan is a sideshow.”
Some economists who spoke to ABC News noted that price increases bedeviled countries across the globe, some of which have suffered much worse inflation than the U.S. In Argentina, inflation has surged to more than 270%; in Turkey, it exceeded 75%.
“It’s important to realize that the bout of inflation is worldwide,” Frankel said.
While Biden should avoid wholesale blame for inflation, he should also command only partial credit for its reduction, economists said. The significant slowdown of inflation over the past two years owes in large part to an aggressive series of interest rate hikes at the Federal Reserve.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell was appointed by Trump to head the central bank in 2018. Despite a tradition of independence at the Fed, Trump pressured Powell to lower interest rates the following year. Biden, for his part, has largely refrained from commenting on the actions of the Fed.