Bits and pieces on the illiterate one. Kamala.
Bill Whitaker: “Was democracy best served by President Biden stepping down and basically handing you a nomination? You didn’t have to go through a primary process. You didn’t have to fight off other contenders. That’s not really the way our system was intended to work.”
Kamala Harris: “President Biden made a decision that I think history is going to show is rare among leaders, which was to put country before self. And I am proud to have earned the support of the vast majority of delegates.”
But Whitaker wasn’t buying it. He added, “But I think this truncated process is why people think or say they don’t really know who you are.”
Bill Whitaker: “You recently visited the southern border and– embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers. And that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?”
Kamala Harris: “The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system, knowing that if you want to actually fix it, we need Congress to act. It was not taken up. Fast forward to a moment when a bipartisan group of members of the United States Senate, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, got together, came up with the border security bill. Well, guess what happened? Donald Trump got word that this bill was afoot and could be passed and he wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem, so he told his buddies in Congress, ‘Kill the bill. Don’t let it move forward.'”
Bill Whitaker: “But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?”
Kamala Harris: “It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.”
