Abortion, parental rights, trans issues: What would a Kamala Harris victory look like?
Education and parental rights
Harris’ campaign website includes a vow that the candidate will “fight to ensure parents can afford high-quality child care and preschool for children.” Additional priorities of the candidate when it comes to education include working to “strengthen public education and training as a pathway to the middle class” and seeking to “end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt and fight to make higher education more affordable, so that college can be a ticket to the middle class.”
The Harris campaign’s economic policy booklet, titled “A New Way Forward for the Middle Class,” includes plans to give a $6,000 tax cut to low and middle-income American families in the first year of their child’s life. It also outlines the Harris campaign’s commitment to “provide a tax credit of up to $3,600 per child for the middle class and the most hard-pressed working families with children.”
“Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are committed to ending unnecessary degree requirements so that good-paying jobs are available to all Americans, not just those with college degrees,” the booklet states. “They will support all viable, high-quality paths to good jobs, such as registered apprenticeships, joint labor-management programs, innovative partnerships between school districts and industries, and career and technical education programs.”
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The campaign website notes that a Harris administration would work to “scale up programs that create good career pathways for non-college students.”
According to the booklet, “As President, [Harris] will get rid of unnecessary degree requirements for hundreds of thousands of federal jobs and will challenge the private sector and state and local governments to take similar action.”
The Harris campaign has not directly addressed concerns about parental rights, which have dominated national headlines in the past few years as parents have confronted school boards about the presence of sexually explicit material in school libraries and other matters.
Harris has, however, served as vice president in the Biden administration, which generated outrage after the U.S. Department of Justice sent a memo to federal law enforcement agencies directing them to “convene meetings with federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders within 30 days” to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
The memo came just five days after the National School Boards Association wrote a letter to President Joe Biden requesting “federal assistance to stop threats and acts of violence against public schoolchildren, public school board members, and other public school district officials and educators.”
The organization maintained that “the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” urging the Biden administration to use “the Gun-Free School Zones Act, the PATRIOT Act in regards to domestic terrorism, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act, the Violent Interference with Federally Protected Rights statute, [and] the Conspiracy Against Rights statute” to take action against those who threaten school officials.”
The likening of concerned parents to domestic terrorists invited a lawsuit against Garland from parents in Michigan. Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the plaintiffs’ request to hear their case after a lower court dismissed it.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: [email protected]
