What does a vice president do exactly? It’s a question that has more importance than ever now that Vice President Kamala Harris has skyrocketed into the spotlight thanks to President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race for the White House. The accomplishments of the vice president will be even more relevant as voters look to assess what the presumptive Democratic nominee plans to do with four more years – this time as a commander in chief.
TheGrio spoke with Sirius XM host, author, and Harris super-advocate Reecie Colbert (@BlackWomenViews), whose social media analysis of Harris has helped garner her a massive online following. Colbert breaks down what the VP has been up to during her tenure and other aspects of the campaign.
Watch the interview above and read an abbreviated transcript of part one of the conversation below:
theGrio: I want to go straight into what are some of Vice President Kamala Harris’s accomplishments? Because the role of the VP really is as a number two. You are to back up the president. So she’s been busy working, but a lot of people don’t know what a vice president does every day. So, can you please list some of the things that [Kamala Harris] accomplished while she’s been in office?
Reecie Colbert: One of the things about Vice President Kamala Harris is that she has taken more than just a ceremonial role within this administration. That’s why it’s called the Biden-Harris administration. You can see … her fingerprints on all parts of the administration’s initiatives and priorities, particularly the racial equity lens that this administration has taken. But she has a very robust portfolio …
She’s overseeing the first-ever Office of Gun Violence and Prevention … tackling an issue that Republicans have been obstructing any progress on for decades now. That’s very important to voters, particularly young voters.
She has led the charge on maternal mortality and addressing maternal health. As the VP, she elevated this issue that she started to make a national issue as the senator from California when she introduced the first-ever Black maternal mortality bill called the Maternal Care Act. So, as a vice president, she led the Maternal Health Task Force, and now 47 states plus D.C. have expanded postpartum Medicaid access from 60 days.
… But now that is 12 months, OK. And that is bipartisan across states that have Republican trifecta. Even states that have not expanded Medicaid access through Obamacare have still expanded the Medicaid expansion for postpartum health care for mothers. They introduced the first-ever national … maternal mental health hotline, which is something that over 38,000 mothers have taken advantage of since the onset of that hotline. And so that’s just one of the two of the initiatives.
But she’s also leading the charge on eradicating lead pipes. So, she has a climate justice lens in her portfolio. She has expanded broadband access. That was one of her assignments in the infrastructure package to get that through. She had over 150 congressional engagements in order to do that.
And I can keep going on, but the reality of it is that Vice President Kamala Harris is a very active, robust vice president, meeting with over 150 foreign leaders on the foreign policy front, having over 20 engagements overseas, visiting 15 countries.
So she is a person [who] has been a trusted partner [for] President Biden, a trusted partner in the Senate … breaking the most number of ties and a leader in her own right and pushing forward things like homeownership appraisal bias and record funding for HBCUs under this administration.
I want to mention, Juneteenth was something that she introduced for the first time as a federal holiday in the Senate in 2020 [which] has now become a holiday under the Biden-Harris administration, as well as [Emmett Till] anti-lynching is now a federal crime. After she restarted, rejuvenated the push to make that a federal crime when she joined the Senate after 200 failed attempts, she was the first to get it passed. And now, it is a law under the Biden-Harris administration.
Follow theGrio for more coverage of the Harris For President 2024 campaign and Election 2024.
