Appearing at the Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans on Thursday and Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris railed against recent conservative Supreme Court rulings and offered this solution: people need to organize against the forces that she said are trying take back rights won by women and people of color.
“I feel very strongly that the promise of America will only be achieved if we’re willing to fight for it,” she said Friday.
The vice president is a regular visitor to Essence, and she seemed particularly at home at an event that is aimed at empowering Black women, the base of the Democratic Party.
She spoke with indignation and emotion but also humor as she answered questions in two different settings.
As she did last year, Harris denounced the Supreme Court’s decision to institute a federal ban on abortion, a ruling that ended the procedure in Louisiana and many other states.
“Is there any law that tells a man what to do with his body?” she asked rhetorically to laughter at one point while speaking to more than 1,000 people at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center on Friday.
Harris also lambasted a Supreme Court ruling on Thursday that ended affirmative action at colleges and universities across the nation and another on Friday that rejected President Biden’s plan to cancel $400 billion in student debt for millions of borrowers, including 600,000 in Louisiana.
Referring to the affirmative action decision, she said on Thursday, “I'm deeply concerned about the implications of this decision to the future of our country, to the future of leadership of our country. This decision is going to have generational impact.”
That day, Harris answered questions for 45 minutes at the Global Black Economic Forum, telling an appreciative crowd at the Four Seasons Hotel at the foot of Canal Street that she believes in public-private business partnerships, that policy-makers need to do more to reduce high maternal mortality rates in the U.S. and that society needs to do a better job of treating the trauma of youths who grow up amid violence.
On Friday, she answered more questions from a crowd thrilled to see her.
Asked about gun violence, Harris said, “We need people in the statehouses and the United States Congress who have the courage to act around very clear and reasonable gun safety laws, who don’t fall for the false choice that you’re either in favor of the 2nd Amendment or you want to take everybody’s guns.
“I support the 2nd Amendment, but we need an assault weapons ban,” she added. “Assault weapons are literally designed to kill a lot of human beings quickly.”
In between her two Essence appearances, on Thursday night, she held a fundraiser in a private room above Cochon Restaurant for the Biden-Harris re-election campaign. It was the same room she spoke in, she would note, when she raised funds in 2019 for her presidential run.
As she began, she told the crowd that Gov. John Bel Edwards told her backstage “how much he appreciates President Biden and me, because every time we come to Louisiana, we just bring all kinds of dough.”
The Biden administration announced this week that Louisiana will receive $1.3 billion in the coming years to extend high-speed and reliable broadband service by 2029 to the 25% of households in Louisiana that don’t have the service today,
Harris noted that last year she visited Sunset, north of Lafayette, to highlight the administration’s commitment to expanding broadband access.
A host of other Democratic political figures besides Edwards attended the fundraiser: U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, former U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond, City Council Vice President Helena Moreno, former Mayor Marc Morial who now heads the National Urban League, state Rep. Jason Hughes and state Rep. Mandie Landry. Local business owners included Pres Kabacoff, Troy Henry and Bill Hammack, a part-owner of Cochon.
Harris was not the only member of Biden’s cabinet to visit New Orleans on Friday. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also became the first person who holds that office to speak at Essence.
"Over the past couple of years, the Black unemployment rate has fallen to historic lows,” Yellen said. “The number of Black active business owners jumped 9 percent from the start of 2021 to the end of 2022. And we saw a huge decline in poverty for Black children in 2021, driven in large part by our policies."
Earlier Friday, Yellen went to St. Rose to the headquarters of PosiGen, which specializes in marketing solar energy systems to lower-income households.
Yellen echoed the basic message of President Joe Biden's keynote speech in Chicago on Wednesday, when he kicked off his administration's concerted effort to promote "Bidenomics," touting the benefits his focus on promoting local industry with government support has had for the middle class. The focus is on Biden's three big pieces of economic legislation: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act.
"These laws together constitute one of the most important economic investments our country has ever made," Yellen said.
Staff reporter Anthony McAuley contributed to this report.