Harris continues to take her message directly to the people

October 16, 2024

Kamala Harris continued to bring her message directly to voters by bypassing major media. She sat for an hour in an interview with Charlamagne Tha God, whose podcast, “Breakfast Club,” reaches millions daily.  The entire interview is here: We The People: An Audio Town Hall With Kamala Harris & Charlamagne Tha God. But if you don’t have sixty minutes to spare, key moments are here:

• Harris responds to MAGA attack ads saying that she “won’t do anything for Black people.” Watch Harris’s answer over five minutes as she corrects the record and attacks the disinformation being peddled by Trump. She challenges Charlamagne, “Ask Donald Trump what his plan is for Black voters. I will tell you what it is. It is Project 2025, which it makes it more difficult for Black Americans to live safely in their communities with full protection of the Constitution.”

• Harris responds to question of whether it “smart politics” to campaign for support directly from the Black community? Harris provides a direct, genuine answer about her desire to be the “president for everybody” while also recognizing the disparities facing Black voters.

• Kamala pushes back against the false claim that she and Biden “did nothing” about immigration for the first three years of their term. If you watch nothing else, check out this answer.

• Kamala answers a question from a listener about Trump's claim that he will use the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 to deport immigrants. Harris calls out Trump for choosing to run on fear of immigration.

The interview also focused on the threat posed by Donald Trump. As she did on Monday, Kamala Harris sharpened her attacks on Trump, agreeing that he posed a “fascist” threat to the United States. For a summary of Harris’s criticisms of Trump, see NYTimes, Harris Agrees Trump Is a Fascist: 5 Charlamagne Interview Takeaways (Accessible to all.)

There are other notable moments, but here is the point: Kamala Harris sat for sixty minutes and answered serious questions from listeners to a program that reaches millions in the Black community every day. Van Jones of CNN rated the performance by Harris as “an A+++.” See CNN, Video: Van Jones reacts to Harris’ radio town hall with Charlamagne tha God. (See remarks beginning at 1:55).

It is beyond quibble that in agreeing to be interviewed by Charlamagne Tha God, Kamala Harris reached millions of listeners in the Black community who might not have otherwise heard her message. It was a smart move.

Critics of Kamala Harris (read: Fox News) are attempting to dismiss the interview as “friendly” and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. Of course, Trump is imploding in “friendly” interviews by allies like Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kristy Noem.

When Trump appeared on Tuesday before a “friendly” crowd at the Chicago Economic Club, he melted down when the interviewer challenged him for not answering the questions. See HuffPo, Trump Defends Tariff Plans In Wandering Remarks In Chicago.

Here is HuffPo’s description of the off-the-rails interview:

Appearing before the Economic Club of Chicago in Illinois, the presidential candidate also said he could do a better job on interest rate policy than Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, claimed he had never criticized 81-year-old President Joe Biden over his age, and refused to say whether he had talked with Russian President Vladimir Putin since the end of Trump's 2017-2021 White House term, as journalist Bob Woodward has reported.

And when the interviewer said that experts disagreed with Trump about tariffs, Trump attacked the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and the interviewer:

“You’re wrong. You’ve been wrong, you’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff,” Trump told John Micklethwait, the editor-in-chief of business news giant Bloomberg News, when the pair disagreed about tariffs and their impact on the U.S. dollar.

“What does The Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything,” Trump said when Micklethwait mentioned the paper’s editorial page being critical of the bigger budget deficits it says his plans would cause.

Although the Trump campaign praised the interview as the best ever by any presidential candidate, the campaign canceled an interview with the business news program on CNBC: See Forbes, Trump Cancels CNBC Interview—As He Fights With Major Networks Over Interviews With Harris.

Trump will drop all future interviews except those with hosts in his pocket. Meanwhile, an increasingly confident Kamala Harris is reportedly in talks to appear on Joe Rogan’s top-rated podcast, has agreed to a CNN townhall in Philadelphia next week, and will appear on a Fox “News” for an interview this week. See The Philadelphia Inquirer, Kamala Harris is going on Fox News in Philly. Donald Trump isn’t happy.

Does it matter that Kamala Harris is running a disciplined, professional, and confident campaign while Trump's campaign is flailing? Yes. A lot. Just imagine if Kamala Harris was running a poor campaign that stumbled and misfired every day. The media and pundits would be unforgiving, claiming that a weak and disorganized campaign was evidence of unfitness to be president.

And yet, Trump has multiple meltdowns each day and major media looks on with mild bemusement. The NYTimes dismissed Trump's 39-minute interlude of listening to music at a rally on Monday as an “improvisational detour.” Really?! If Harris had done the same thing, the Times would have described the event as “disqualifying.” Perhaps that explains why Kamala Harris would rather be interviewed by Fox News than the NYTimes.

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Two important court decisions

Two court decisions in the last forty-eight hours provide insight into Democratic efforts to fight Republican efforts to cheat in the 2024 election. Indeed, many readers send worried emails asking, “Are Democrats prepared to respond to Republican efforts to undermine the election?” The answer is, “Yes.” Even better, Democrats aren’t waiting for Election Day to take action—as shown by two recent court decisions.

On Tuesday, a Georgia trial judge enjoined enforcement of a state election board rule requiring a hand-count of ballots. See ABC News, Georgia's controversial hand count rule blocked by judge, 'too much, too late'. State court Judge Robert McBurney said that the hand-count rule would invite “administrative chaos and error.”

Six other lawsuits are challenging last-minute rules by the Georgia state election board—which is controlled by MAGA extremists. See Democracy Docket, Georgia State Election Board Faces Barrage of Lawsuits - Democracy Docket

On Monday, the Arizona Supreme Court issued an order requiring trial courts in that state to “prioritize” election-related litigation so that challenges could be resolved as quickly as possible. See Democracy Docket, Arizona Supreme Court Orders Prioritization of Post-Election Litigation.

Per Democracy Docket,

The order also mandates that any appeals regarding rulings on presidential electors must be filed no later than 1 p.m. on December 6. [A court spokesperson said] “By setting a firm deadline for appeals, the Supreme Court has made certain that all electoral disputes are resolved ahead of Electoral College deadlines, maintaining Arizona’s commitment to safe, fair, and secure elections.”

Thus, the Arizona Supreme Court has ensured that all election related disputes under state law be on its docket four days before the governor of the state must issue a “certificate of ascertainment” that identifies the winning electoral slate.

Here’s my point: Yes, Republicans plan to muck up the election outcome if possible. Democrats aren’t waiting around for that to happen. They are proactively filing lawsuits now to remove obstacles to the timely count of electoral ballots.

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Professor Laurence Tribe’s reflection on Project 2025

Professor Tribe’s career as America’s leading constitutional scholar spans half a century. From that unique vantage, he is raising the alarm about Project 2025’s most pernicious goal—one that is frequently lost in understandable concern about the plan to weaponize the DOJ against Trump's political enemies.

In a thoughtful essay in The New York Review of Books, Professor Tribe identifies Project 2025’s most dangerous aim as that of imposing a “theocratic autocracy” to extinguish fundamental liberties at the core of our democratic existence. See Laurence H. Tribe, The New York Review of Books, Where Freedom Ends.

Professor Tribe addresses the current threat to constitutional liberties by tracing his career defending those liberties before the Supreme Court. His career began during a hopeful time when the Court was recognizing and defending personal liberties against encroachment by a web of theocratic prohibitions masquerading as civil law. The watershed case of Roe v. Wade was one of many cases that challenged religious dogma posing as legislative policy. The victories that began with Roe v. Wade (reproductive liberty) ran through Obergefell v. Hodges (marriage equality).

Since the 2015 high water mark, small groups of religious fundamentalists have engineered a “regulatory capture” of the Supreme Court. The Court has been reduced to the political action arm of the Christian nationalism. That movement aims to extinguish all rights that conflict with its extreme religious doctrine. As Professor Tribe writes,

Law can oppress as easily as it can liberate, and it is the everyday life we lead at our kitchen tables and in our bedrooms that is most dangerously threatened by a return of Trump to power.

As Professor Tribe notes, Project 2025 is at root a religiously motivated effort to replace civil rights with religious dogma. The trappings of an imperial presidency are the means to imposing the religious values of a small minority on the personal lives of all Americans. As Professor Tribe writes,

The threat to all our personal freedoms and civil liberties posed by a second Trump administration is not principally that Trump will finally have learned how to thoroughly weaponize his Department of Justice, filling it with obedient acolytes. We needn’t underestimate this threat to recognize that we look through the wrong end of the telescope if we focus on the powers an unleashed president might exercise through his underlings rather than on the freedoms that exercise would suffocate.

There is much more in Professor Tribe’s essay that merits your consideration. But if we take nothing else away from his essay, it is that the threat of a second Trump term is that it aims to erase the promise that lies at the heart of American democracy: “Liberty and justice for all.”

But Professor Tribe is not merely raising the alarm. He notes that he is “tirelessly working” to achieve the results in 2024 that will allow for the restoration of the rights abrogated in Dobbs. Like Professor Tribe, we must simultaneously recognize the true nature of the threats we face while working diligently to prevent those threats from materializing. The fact that the nation’s preeminent constitutional scholar of the last half century is on the front lines in the defense of liberty tells us all we need to know about the urgency of our own actions.

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Opportunities for Reader Engagement

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Join Force Multiplier and the Rural Democracy Initiative in supporting pro-democracy groups in rural America. 

Thursday, October 17,  7:00-8:00pm ET on Zoom   Register and Donate Here . 

Speakers include:

• Sarah Jaynes, Executive Director, Rural Democracy Initiative + Rural Victory Fund

• Melissa Morales, Founder + President of Somos Votantes +Project Director of The Winning Jobs Narrative 

• Jess Piper, rural mom, teacher, candidate + author of  the Substack newsletter, “The View From Missouri” 

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Concluding Thoughts

I continue to receive reports from field volunteers saying that the enthusiasm and commitment they encounter during canvassing and phone banking is significantly higher than in 2022 and 2020. That sentiment appears to be consistent with the blockbuster first day of early voting in Georgia. See Georgia Recorder, Georgia’s early voting first-day turnout already breaks record.

A couple of dozen readers emailed me asking some variant of the following question: If electors are appointed on Election Day, how can votes be counted after Election Day?” The answer is straightforward: The act of voting must occur on or before Election Day. The separate act of tallying those votes can occur after Election Day without affecting the validity of the votes.

Think about it this way: You get married on June 1, following all the laws of your state. It takes three months for the county registrar to mail you a certified copy of your marriage certificate. Your marriage was legal and effective on June 1, even though the paperwork took three months to issue. Votes cast on or before Election Day are valid in determining the appointment of electors, even though the results are not known for several days or weeks. Votes have been counted after election day as far back as the presidential election of 1800.

The more time I study the Electoral Count Reform Act, the more confident I feel that the “center will hold” on January 6. Over the next few days, I will address provisions of the ECRA to help everyone understand what will happen after Election Day.

Today, I want to address the misconception that Congress “certifies” the electoral count on January 6. It does not. All that happens is that electoral ballots are opened and announced. “Tellers” add up the votes. The President of the Senate announces the results. The person with a majority of the appointed electors is the president without any further action.

Here is what the 12th Amendment says:

The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;

The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President . . .

Here is what the ECRA says:

The President of the Senate (i.e., Kamala Harris) shall—(A) open the certificates and papers purporting to be certificates of the votes of electors . . . “(B) upon opening any certificate, hand the certificate and any accompanying papers to the tellers, who shall read the same in the presence and hearing of the two Houses.

The tellers shall make a list of the votes as they shall appear from the said certificates; . . . . , the result of the same shall be delivered to the President of the Senate, who shall thereupon announce the state of the vote, which announcement shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the persons, if any, elected President and Vice President of the United States.

Both the Constitution and the ECRA make clear that

1. The President of the Senate opens the electoral votes,

2. The “tellers” announce the votes and hand the “list” of votes to the President of the Senate (Kamala Harris),

3. The President of the Senate then announces the winner.

Per the ECRA, that announcement by Kamala Harris “shall be a sufficient declaration” of the person elected President.

You will note that nothing in the Constitution or the ECRA says that Congress “certifies” the electors' votes. The opening and counting by the tellers and announcement by the President of the Senate are the only acts necessary to declare who has won the presidency.

I previously described the possibility of objections, the grounds for which are severely circumscribed by the ECRA. If Democrats win the House or retain the Senate, there is no possibility that any objection will be sustained.

Here’s my point: The language used by pundits and some legal experts is imprecise and does not adequately acknowledge the relevant provisions of the Constitution or the ECRA. That imprecision is generally used as a tactic to frighten you.

So, tonight’s takeaway is that Congress does not “certify” the electoral votes. The electoral votes are cast on December 17 by the winning slates of electors in each state. They are counted on January 6 in a joint session of Congress. The candidate with the majority of appointed electors is the President. Period. Full stop.

That’s it for this evening. Talk to you tomorrow!

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Daily Dose of Perspective

The image below shows the Cone Nebula, which is 2,700 light-years from Earth and seven light-years long.