SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
Former US vice president Kamala Harris has used her first major speech since leaving office to warn that Donald Trump is not unleashing “chaos” on America but helping orchestrate a “high velocity event” to enact a decades-old right-wing policy agenda.
She also encouraged Democrats to fight back harder but offered no reflections on her election loss to Trump in November, nor what the Democratic Party would need to do to win over voters who had opted for the Republican Party or decided not to show up at the polls.
Former vice president and failed presidential contender Kamala Harris emerged for her first major speech since leaving office.Credit: AP
“Some people are describing what’s been happening in recent months as absolute chaos, and I understand why,” Harris said of the Trump administration.
“But friends, please let us not be duped into thinking everything is chaos. I know it may feel that way. But understand what we are in fact witnessing is a high velocity event where a vessel is being used for the swift implementation of an agenda that has been decades in the making.”
The exception to that was the president’s program of worldwide tariffs, which she said were “clearly inviting a recession” after data released hours earlier showed the US economy contracted 0.3 per cent in the last quarter.
The “reckless tariffs”, she said, were creating “the greatest man-made economic crisis in modern presidential history”.
Harris made the remarks at a gala for Emerge America, a Democratic women’s organisation, in San Francisco on Wednesday night (Thursday AEST) in the same week Trump marked 100 days in office.
It also comes as Democrats debate their tactics for taking on Trump and several start to make speeches laying out policy visions and priorities.
In her speech, Harris pointedly praised a number of progressive members of Congress, including two-time presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, but omitted any mention of the Democrats’ leaders in the House and Senate, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.
Schumer especially has been criticised for accepting a Republican bill to avoid a government shutdown and received an overall approval rating of just 17 per cent in a recent CNN poll.
Harris implicitly argued against compromising support for migrants, universities or the rule of law in the face of Trump’s deportations, defunding of colleges and provocation of judges.
“It is not OK to violate court orders. It is not OK to detain and disappear American citizens – or anyone – without due process,” she said.
“Instead of an administration working to advance America’s highest ideals, we are witnessing the wholesale abandonment of those ideals.”
Trump intended to slash public education, shrink government and privatise its services, “all while giving tax breaks to the wealthiest among us”, she said. This was “an agenda that is not lowering costs, not making life more affordable and not what they promised”.
US President Donald Trump at a rally in Michigan to mark 100 days in office.Credit: AP
“It’s a narrow, self-serving vision of America where they punish truth-tellers, favour loyalists, cash in on their power and leave everyone to fend for themselves, all while abandoning allies and retreating from the world.”
Harris also warned America’s institutions may not constrain the president as the country’s founding fathers intended.
“When the checks and balances ultimately collapse, if Congress fails to do its apart, or if the courts fail to do their part – or if both do their part but the president defies them anyway – that is called a constitutional crisis, and that is a crisis that will eventually impact everyone,” she said.
“If that happens, the one check, the one balance, the one power that must not fail is the voice of the people.”
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