Caregivers All LET'S F*CKING GOOOOOO About Kamala Harris, Because Look At Her Record!
The Momala Agenda is on its way.
As Kamala Harris ramps up her presidential campaign, she’s already giving some hints to what her governing priorities will be — if we can help her preserve democracy by booting Donald Trump back to his Florida Trash Palace to wait for the criminal trials that he’s running to avoid. As this terrific article at The 19th details, one central focus for a President Harris is almost certain to be the caregiving economy, the mostly female segment of the workforce who take care of America’s children and provide assistance to elderly and disabled folks in both home and long-term care settings.
The article notes that Harris speaks often of both her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who raised Kamala and her sister Maya as a single parent, and also of her “second mother,” Regina Shelton, who lived nearby and watched the girls while Gopalan, a cancer researcher, had to work late. We learn that “Shelton became such a fixture of Harris’ life that when she was sworn in as vice president, Harris took the oath of office with her hand on Shelton’s family Bible,” and that’s about the sweetest thing we’ve read today.
Harris, while pursuing her legal and political career, has also taken on the role of caregiver herself, cooking and caring for her mother so she could stay in her home while she was under treatment for terminal cancer. And of course she became the stepmother to her husband’s two kids, who took to calling her “Momala.”
So it’s little surprise that Harris is a big advocate for caregivers and for helping families when they need to provide care for family members. She’s long supported paid family and medical leave, better pay and workplace protections for workers in caregiving jobs, affordable childcare, and improvements to what passes as our “system” of longterm care for elderly and disabled people.
In her speech Monday at Biden-Harris (now Harris-[utility infielder to be named later]) campaign headquarters, Harris mentioned elements of the administration’s goals that have so far been unrealized because a certain former Democratic senator decided helping families is bad and also had a snit because he felt disrespected.
“We believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty, where every person can buy a home, start a family and build wealth. And where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care. Together we fight to build a nation where every person has affordable healthcare, where every worker is paid fairly, and where every senior can retire with dignity.”
The 19th spoke with several people in care economy nonprofits who are all pretty excited about the prospects of a Kamala Harris presidency, particularly given Harris’s record in the Senate and several of the proposals she made during her 2020 presidential campaign.
In 2019, when she ran in the Democratic presidential primary, she crafted a platform centered on family issues. Harris proposed creating a six-month paid family and medical leave policy, one of the most ambitious paid leave proposals Democrats have put forward, with a provision for “chosen family” that would allow LGBTQ+ parents, as well as others, to also take leave. It was far beyond the four-week universal paid leave policy Biden included in his 2021 economic package that ultimately failed to pass the Senate.
The article also highlights one of our own favorite pieces of legislation put forward by Harris when she was in the Senate, the National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which sought to protect the more than 2 million home care and child care workers — 92 percent of whom are women, and most of them women of color. Their work is often not seen as all that important, and they often face wage theft, sexual harassment, and arbitrary firing.
As Harris noted in a CNN op-ed she co-wrote when the bill was introduced, the sad state of rights for workers in the care economy is at least in part the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s negotiations to get racist Southern Democrats to support the New Deal. Domestic workers were deliberately excluded from labor protections then, setting a precedent that continued for decades. Just one more of those structural racism things that rightwing culture warriors claim don’t exist.
April Verrett, the first Black woman president of the Service Employees International Union, the powerful union no Democrat can win without (and the first union to endorse Harris after Biden stepped aside), noted that
“The work that these women do is the work that enslaved women did. It was not respected then. In many of the same ways, it’s not respected now. […] What excites me the most is what this means … for women caregivers who often are not valued for their contributions to our country. They know firsthand that Vice President Harris sees them.”
Harris has also been a staunch advocate of the expanded child tax credit, which for the half year it was in place during the pandemic sharply reduced child poverty, and which the administration has sought to make permanent. When she announced last year a new federal rule capping the cost of childcare for the poorest families, Harris said, “This fight is personal for me. My mother often said that if not for Mrs. Shelton, she would never have been able to do the work that she did. Those are the stakes of this work: bringing child care to all families who need it.”
But wait! What about the other party’s family and care economy policy plans? Haha, we are very funny. They consist of making women have more babies and not having careers so they can take care of the babies, and also fuck you if you aren’t already rich. It’s no coincidence that when Donald Trump was asked in the debate what he would do to make childcare more affordable for Americans, he spent his allotted time ranting about all the people he’d fired from the White House, and how that made him tough, and why didn’t Joe Biden fire people, which is why the borders are open and Biden is the worst president and wants our country to be destroyed.
Then Jake Tapper said “Thank you, President Trump” and let Biden have a one-minute reply. Joe brought the discussion back to childcare and the need to expand the child tax credit and to incentivize onsite childcare at businesses, so that was good until the time ran out. Tapper asked Trump a second time what he’d do to make childcare affordable, and this is Trump’s plan for improving childcare:
Just you understand, we have polling. We have other things that do — they rate him the worst because what he’s done is so bad. And they rate me — yes, I’ll show you. I will show you. And they rate me one of the best. OK.
And if I’m given another four years, I will be the best. I think I’ll be the best. Nobody’s ever created an economy like us. Nobody ever cut taxes like us. He’s the only one I know. He wants to raise your taxes by four times. He wants to raise everybody’s taxes by four times. He wants the Trump tax cuts to expire so everybody, including the two of you, are going to pay four to five times. Nobody ever heard of this before.
A compelling argument, to be sure. So we think Kamala Harris has the policy edge on this issue.
It seems entirely reasonable to expect that Harris will bring back much of the family- and care-related parts of Build Back Better that were blocked by You Know Who. Biden made clear that was part of his own second-term agenda. But it’ll really be interesting to see how she reshapes and possibly even goes beyond Biden’s policy goals now that she’s at the top of the ticket.
[The 19th / CNN debate transcript]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if a one-time donation works better for you, we have just the button you need.
I am a childcare worker. I've helped raise a lot of kids. I am proud of that and love all of them but the pay is shit. Thanks VP Harris!
Harris is a caregiver.
Trump told his nephew to let disabled son die then move to Florida.
How is this a close race?