Key events
Ahead of her campaign trip to Tuscon, Arizona, on Friday, where she is expected to blame Donald Trump for the country’s abortion rights crisis, Kamala Harris tweeted:
Women across our country are suffering at the hands of extremists who say they’re motivated by the well-being of women and children but ignore the crisis of maternal mortality.
Women across our country are suffering at the hands of extremists who say they’re motivated by the well-being of women and children but ignore the crisis of maternal mortality. pic.twitter.com/xU4qM81aE3
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) April 12, 2024
Kamala Harris expected to blame Trump for US abortion rights crisis on Arizona visit
Good morning,
The vice-president, Kamala Harris, is set to travel to Tucson, Arizona, for a campaign event where she is expected to explicitly blame Donald Trump as the “architect” of the abortion rights crisis in the US.
Harris’s trip to Arizona comes after the state’s supreme court ruled on Wednesday that a 1864 law with no exceptions for rape or incest can go into effect.
“Donald Trump is the architect of this healthcare crisis. And that’s not a fact he hides. In fact, he brags about it,” Harris is expected to say, Politico reports. “We all must understand who is to blame. It is the former president, Donald Trump. It is Donald Trump who, during his campaign in 2016, said women should be punished for seeking an abortion.”
With Harris instructing her team to designate the trip as a campaign event, one senior Harris aide told Politico that she is “not subject to the Hatch Act and she can say whatever the heck she wants … we could really be unencumbered in how we tell the story.”
Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, Harris has repeatedly gone after anti-abortion conservatives as she and Joe Biden cement abortion as a key campaign issue in this year’s presidential election campaign.
Here are other developments in US politics:
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The House Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, will meet with Trump in Mar-a-Lago, where they plan to deliver remarks on “election integrity”, NBC reports.
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The House is set to vote on the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the controversial legislation that failed two days ago in the Republican-led chamber.
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Biden is set to deliver a virtual keynote address at Rev Al Sharpton’s annual racial justice conference in New York.
