Why Kamala Harris Has A Chance To Make History As A Policymaker

One of the Biden administration’s biggest legislative setbacks came when Democratic leaders had to give up on their “caregiving” agenda.

The idea had been to transform everyday life for tens of millions of Americans by guaranteeing access to child care and paid leave, as well as home care for seniors and people with disabilities. And while the concept enjoyed plenty of support among high-ranking officials, few (if any) made it as much of a priority as Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris had championed all three policies as early as the presidential transition, according to several sources inside and outside the White House who spoke with HuffPost. Later, Harris and her advisers advocated internally for including major new investments as part of what eventually became known as the “Build Back Better” legislation.

“Her policy team really fought for it,” said Ai-jen Poo, who, as president of the National Workers Alliance, worked closely with the administration. And when efforts to enact the reforms eventually came up short because two members of the Senate Democratic caucus wouldn’t vote yes on the full legislative package, Harris made sure her allies knew the fight wasn’t over.

“The vice president personally said to me that she is really committed to moving this agenda forward,” Poo said, “that she’s not going to give up, and we shouldn’t give up, either.”

At the time, it felt like a promise for what President Joe Biden might pursue in a second term if he got one. Now, with Biden stepping aside and Harris the Democrats’ presumptive 2024 nominee, Poo cites that statement as one of several signs Harris would make caregiving a priority if she wins in November.

That feels like a pretty good bet.

Election Day is less than four months away, Inauguration Day less than two months after that. But the unique circumstances of this campaign mean the elements of Harris’ prospective agenda are less clear than they normally would be at this point, at least by Democratic Party standards.

On the one hand, Harris is part of an incumbent administration, running on its record and previously announced plans for new initiatives. But while Harris has certainly helped to shape both, she has never been the ultimate decision-maker. It’s safe to assume Harris has some different ideas about what to do or, at least, how to prioritize. Had there been a normal primary campaign, Harris would have sketched out that governing vision.

That never happened, and it’s probably not going to happen now. With her candidacy not even two weeks old, plus a running mate still to name and a convention still to stage, Harris doesn’t have the time to put together a bunch of new policies, let alone introduce them with speeches, white papers and expert testimonials.

Her press team, meanwhile, isn’t saying much about policy ― except to confirm that Harris is no longer committed to some of the more progressive positions of her 2020 presidential bid, like promising to ban fracking or promoting a kinda-sorta-Medicare-for-All plan.

Not that big new agenda pronouncements would get a ton of attention anyway. Threats to democracy and attacks on abortion rights are understandably much bigger preoccupations right now, and for much of the electorate, the most important thing about Harris is that she would fight both.

But Harris could win, putting her in a position to lay out a legislative agenda. And there’s plenty of reason to think caregiving initiatives would be a bit part of that, including the fact that policy conditions — in particular, the expiration of Trump-era tax cuts that could free up trillions in new funding — could give Harris a shot at ambitious, even historic reforms if she has a willing Congress to go along.

“She could walk away from that first term saying that I brought America its first paid family leave and universal pre-K, and a refundable child tax credit that basically ends child poverty ― that’d be a hell of a legacy,” Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of the National Economic Council, told HuffPost. “That’s really within grasp.”

Voices For Women ― And For Caregivers

It wasn’t that long ago caregiving was an afterthought in the political conversation, which had a lot to do with the conversation’s leaders.

Men were overwhelmingly the ones dominating the media, in charge of powerful interest groups and serving in elected office. If kids needed somebody to watch over them, or if an elderly or disabled relative needed care, that was a job for their wives and sisters and daughters and mothers ― or, maybe, women doing that work for salaries roughly equivalent to what parking lot attendants made. In any case, it was almost never a problem for the men in charge — not at home, and not in the halls of power, either.

The political environment has shifted a lot since then, with challenges tied to care for children, elders and people with disabilities getting more attention. A driving force behind this shift has been the arrival of so many more women in so many more positions of authority.

Kamala Harris is one of them.

The well-being of children has been an area of focus ever since she was a district attorney in San Francisco and, later, the attorney general for California. Her legacy in the state includes the creation of a Bureau for Children’s Justice, which used the attorney general’s authority to investigate and (when appropriate) punish private and public sector organizations that serve children.

Harris’ work to protect foster kids and juveniles in the justice system won praise from child welfare advocates, although an initiative to prosecute parents of truant children drew sharp criticism. (Harris later said she had regrets about it.)

Her election to the U.S. Senate in 2016 gave her a chance to try and pass new laws, rather than simply enforce existing ones. In 2019, she did just that when she sponsored the Senate version of a “Domestic Workers Bill of Rights,” which proposed to give workers at home — a category that includes caregivers and nannies — long-denied labor protections like the right to a minimum wage and guarantees of safe working conditions.

Protecting workers from exploitation was still not that far removed from her work as attorney general, where the job description included going after businesses and other powerful interests exploiting the vulnerable. But Pramila Jayapal, the progressive House Democrat from Washington state who led the Domestic Bill of Rights effort in Congress, thinks it’s not a coincidence that Harris was quick to embrace the cause of a workforce whose members are predominantly women — and, more often than not, women of color.

“She invested time into getting to know these workers, largely women, in the state of California,” Jayapal told HuffPost. “I think these people could really see themselves in her, and she could see herself in them. And so every time she spoke … on domestic work, on child care, on paid leave, as a Black and South Asian woman, she was able to connect to that work and to the idea that this is the work that makes all other work possible.”

Stories Of Working Mothers, Including Hers

Harris took an even bigger swing when she signed on to the “FAMILY Act,” a Democratic bill to guarantee paid leave — and then, as part of her presidential bid for 2020, rolled out an even more ambitious proposal that envisioned six months of paid leave.

“I’ve been saying she is, in a lot of ways, the strongest paid leave elected [official] or candidate we’ve ever seen,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, founding director of Paid Leave for All.

To make the case for paid leave, Harris frequently invokes the story of somebody close to her heart: her mother, who in her final years was battling cancer. “These issues have always been part of her agenda,” said Vicki Shabo, a longtime gender equity policy expert now at New America’s Better Life Lab (though speaking in her personal capacity, not for the organization). “She talks about her mother, her mother being such an important influence, and then pivots to her mother being sick and needing to care for her.”

As a senator, Harris also cosponsored the Child Care for Working Families proposal, which sought to create “universal child care” by giving states enough money to cap child care costs for any family at 7% of household income. It was a vision for the largest expansion of the welfare state since the Affordable Care Act, one that would require hundreds of billions of dollars of new government spending in just the first 10 years.

Patty Murray, the Democratic senator from Washington state who was the bill’s chief architect, told HuffPost that “it took no convincing” and that Harris “got it immediately, intuitively” — and that, once again, the experience of her mother loomed large.

“She understood her mother couldn’t go to work unless she had a place for her daughters,” Murray told HuffPost. “Kamala knows that, and she knows that so many families today have the same kind of struggle. She wants women to be who they can be. If they want to be a stay-at-home mom, great. If they don’t want to have kids, great. But if they want to be out in the workforce, they need to have that kind of support, so that their kids are taken care of.”

Murray’s child care bill would go on to become the template for the ill-fated child care portion of the Build Back Better care package ― the one that Harris, as vice president, had worked so hard to help pass.

And while that effort failed, an earlier one succeeded.

It was during the transition, as Biden and the rest of his advisers were discussing how to structure an emergency relief bill to deal with the economic shocks of the coronavirus pandemic. Harris was a vocal advocate for including a fund to rescue child care providers, many of whom were downsizing or closing — first because they’d lost their customers, later because they couldn’t hire back their workers.

“There were meetings with top officials, and with the president, where she made it very clear that it was important that we address the needs of women and families,” Neera Tanden, who was on the transition team and is now Biden’s domestic policy adviser, told HuffPost. “She talked a lot about women having to come out of the workforce during the pandemic. She was also clear that child care infrastructure was really rickety even before the pandemic.”

Harris was hardly the only member of Biden’s team making that case, Tanden said, but she was “by far the most influential.”

And the arguments Harris was endorsing prevailed. The American Rescue Plan ultimately included a $24 billion investment in child care that, according to a later analysis from the White House Council of Economic Advisers, “helped hundreds of thousands of women with young children enter or reenter the workforce more quickly,” and “boosted the child care workforce and helped raise the real wages of child care workers.”

Carmel Martin, who served for a time as Harris’ domestic policy adviser in the White House, told HuffPost she thinks a common element in that achievement ― and all the other efforts Harris has made to bolster caregiving ― is an ability to see the intersections between the interests of people receiving care and those providing it.

“I think she really appreciates just how important that suite of issues is in terms of child well-being, but also for empowering women to be able to enter into and stay in the workforce if that’s what they want to do,” said Martin, who is now an adviser to Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland. “It’s also about empowering parents more broadly, rather than just women, but we do know that these policies seem to have a particular impact on women’s workforce participation.”

Shabo also thinks Harris grasps these issues in ways male politicians typically can’t: “It hits differently. I don’t want to play the gender card — these are hugely important issues regardless of gender ― but it impacts women differently, and they talk about it differently.”

The Caregiving Agenda’s Policy Questions

One reason to think these interests might carry over into a Harris presidency is that she has made early, clear references to both child care and paid leave in her speeches since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee.

“We definitely noticed that the first things that were being discussed in her public remarks were all related to the care agenda,” said Nicole Jorwic, chief of advocacy and campaigns at Caring Across Generations. Harris’ rhetoric also drew the attention of editors at The 19th, the nonprofit publication focusing on gender and policy, who called Harris “The candidate caregivers have been waiting for.”

But actually passing major legislation on any element of the care agenda, let alone the entire package, would require more than commitment. It would require settling on the right policies — and rounding up enough votes.

The latter would obviously be a lot easier if Democrats get a majority in the House while holding on to the Senate ― which, although hardly likely, is certainly possible. If Democrats do keep control of the Senate, they will no longer have to deal with the two most conservative caucus members (Democrats-turned-independents Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona), who stood in the way of passing Build Back Better’s care agenda last time.

Democrats would also have some money at their disposal, thanks to the looming expiration of the massive tax cuts Donald Trump signed into law when he was president.

“If you can pull off a win and Democratic control of Congress, you can pass transformative legislation,” said Ramamurti. “I’m not overstating that. All of these issues on child care, elderly care, the cost of higher education ― and raising taxes on the rich ― you can accomplish that because $4.6 trillion of Trump tax cuts are expiring.”

But funding the full care agenda would require a deft sales job even in a Democratic Senate without Manchin and Sinema ― and not just because the caucuses in each chamber would still have members skittish about so much spending. During the Build Back Better debate, the child care proposal in particular came under new scrutiny over the possibility it would create either price shocks, shortages, or both.

“If lawmakers do not fix these design problems, they could wreak havoc on many of the families they are trying to help,” Matt Bruenig, president of the People’s Policy Project, wrote at the time.

Bigger, more fundamental criticisms came from conservatives, who have historically opposed such large expansions of either spending or regulation, let alone both. And those criticisms will come with serious political consequences if Republicans control one or both houses, meaning that no care initiatives could get through Congress without their support. In that scenario, the kind of ambitious initiatives that were in Build Back Better would be virtually impossible to pass.

But there’s a vast middle ground between historic reforms and nothing at all, and reason to think much narrower initiatives could become law.

Even many relatively conservative members of the business community have come to see unaffordable, unreliable child care as an impediment to maintaining their workforces. Some conservative intellectuals (and some Republicans who apparently listen to them) have been making the case for more limited support of children with families, especially if it comes with fewer regulatory requirements.

“It would have to be pretty modest and incremental, but I do think there would be some willingness to say, look, the prices of services in general are rising higher than the pace of inflation, and child care especially is something that hits parents,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told HuffPost.

As Brown noted, Republican senators like Marco Rubio of Florida and Tim Scott of South Carolina have histories of promoting bills with support for child care, direct support for families or both. And last year, many Republicans voted for legislation with a 30% increase in federal spending on child care for low-income families.

The key to any bipartisan compromise, Brown said, would be taking Republican preferences seriously, and eventually incorporating some of them. “In an ideal world, it would require a little bit of give and take from both sides,” Brown said.

Aides who have worked with Harris think she’d be open to that if more ambitious proposals aren’t possible ― that she’s more pragmatic and less locked into what policy should look like than recent Republican portrayals of her as a radical Democrat suggest.

“Good lawyers can argue either side of the case as effectively as the other,” Martin said, “and I think being able to see the other side, meet people where they’re at, is one of the vice president’s strengths.”

The Message And The Messenger

Harris’ ability to manage such a situation with Congress ― or any situation with Congress ― is arguably the biggest question mark on her resume because it’s a skill that even gifted politicians take time to master. And Harris, frankly, hasn’t had that much time.

She had been in the Senate for just two years when she announced she was running in the 2020 presidential election. During her unsuccessful bid to win the Democratic nomination, she struggled to explain and defend her health care plan in ways that raised questions about whether she fully understood ― or believed in ― what she was proposing.

And while she’s now had three-plus years in the White House, it was Biden, the veteran legislator, who took the bulk of the negotiating portfolio. Harris, by most accounts, spent more of her time coordinating with outside groups or steering policy from within the White House.

But a big part of passing legislation is selling the product to Congress, to interest groups, and ultimately, to the public at large. And as Harris’ supporters are fond of noting, winning over everyday Americans is a lot like winning over a jury — a skill Harris demonstrated back in her prosecutor days.

“When we were advocating for changes that we were seeking,” Martin said, “she really pressed us as staff to be able to not speak like the policy wonks that we are ― to be able to translate what we were talking about so that people in the midst of their busy lives could understand why it was important, how it would be important to them, how it would be important for other people and have impacts on our economy or our society.”

These conversations shaped the way Harris’ office presented material through press releases and reports, Martin said, while giving Harris grist for her public appearances.

“She really pressed us for specifics, like tell me how that’s going to help the average person who’s getting up and going to work every day, and trying to take care of their family,” Martin said. “So then, when she went out and communicated, she always incorporated those examples.”

But it’s one thing to have that material ready at hand; quite another to deliver it with conviction and authenticity ― and that, Tanden said, is where Harris can speak to caregiving issues in a way no president in history has.

“I think that there are political leaders who get these issues in their bones because they have lived experience, they see what women go through,” Tanden said. “She knows the tradeoffs parents have to make. She has a unique set of experiences, as a woman leader, as a parent of stepchildren.”

“It’s different to be a woman president,” said Tanden, who worked in both the Clinton and Obama administrations and served as a top adviser to Hillary Clinton up through the 2016 presidential campaign. “I worked for a long time for Hillary Clinton, she felt these issues in her bones, and I think the vice president does, too.”