Jonathan Capehart

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>> Jonathan Capehart:: I'm Jonathan Capehart, and this is "Cape Up."

Senator Kamala Harris of California is seemingly everywhere -- talking about police reform, the coronavirus pandemic, and the explosive allegation that the Russians were paying bounties to the Taliban for killing American troops.

But there was one question Harris gracefully dodged -- twice.

Listen to what the leading contender to be Joe Biden's running mate has to say and listen to what she doesn't say in this "Cape Up" Washington Post live special from July 2nd right now.

>> Jonathan Capehart> Senator Harris, welcome back.

>> Kamala Harris> Good to be with you, Jonathan.

And happy birthday.

>> Jonathan Capehart> Thank you, Senator.

Thank you.

So, before we get to police reform, we have to get to intelligence and the Russia story of paying bounties on the lives of American soldiers.

You are a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

You attended a briefing regarding the allegations that Russia was involved in this.

Given what you learned, is the intelligence in doubt?

>> Kamala Harris> Is the intelligence in doubt?

I would say that during the course of my three-plus years of being on the Senate Intelligence Committee and, therefore, in regular receipt of classified information about the threats to our national security and hot spots around the world, that I have come to respect -- highly respect -- the intelligence community for their professionalism, for the detail, and the precision with which they work, and the enormity of their responsibility, which is to inform us as policymakers, to inform the executive branch in a way that we can make smart decisions that are in the best interest of our nation's security.

>> Jonathan Capehart> So, okay.

So, given what you learned, is it credible that President Trump did not know about this intelligence about the Russians paying Taliban bounties on the heads of American soldiers?

>> Kamala Harris> I am not in a position to share with you classified information, but I will say this.

It is well known and understood that part of the responsibility of the President of the United States is to concern himself or herself with the well-being of our service members, who sacrifice and are willing to sacrifice their lives in honor and in protection of our country and our security.

And it would be wonderful to have a president who actually cares about those men and women and expresses some level of concern about their well-being, but we don't see that with Donald Trump in any meaningful way.

He doesn't when it's time to -- What he wants do is have a military parade.

But the reality is, you know, I've been to Afghanistan.

I've been to these hot spots.

And our folks need a president and a commander in chief who has their best interests as his or her first priority.

And we've just, frankly, not seen Donald Trump.

>> Jonathan Capehart> So, given what you just said and given the briefings that you've just attended, but especially given what you just said about President Trump, do you think the President of the United States is a national-security threat?

>> Kamala Harris> In many ways, I think that he has not, throughout his tenure as president, prioritized what is in the best interest of the health and well-being of the American people on the homeland or around the world.

And you can just look at this most recent threat to the health and well-being of our country, which is this pandemic, and from the very beginning, Donald Trump referred to it as a hoax.

He has spent full time trying to minimize the seriousness of it.

He has attempted to muzzle public-health experts and to deny the realities of the harm and also what we can do to mitigate the harm, such as wearing a mask and basic things that are necessary to stem the tide of this virus until we get a vaccine.

You can talk about it on the issue of climate crisis and the fact that he has been basically a science denier.

And then you can look at the fact that, again, our intelligence community has been very clear, unanimous in its finding of Russia's interference in the election of the President of the United States in 2016, and, again, he dismisses the seriousness or the significance or the veracity of that information.

So we have many examples that tell us that Donald Trump is not well-equipped, if at all equipped, to be the commander in chief.

>> Jonathan Capehart> Senator, why won't the president take action against Russia?

I mean, this latest story isn't the first time Russia has done something that goes counter to either America's interests or the interests of the NATO alliance.

So why won't he hold them accountable for some of the egregious things that they've done?

>> Kamala Harris> I can't speculate or get into the mind of Donald Trump.

And I think that, frankly, I'm too busy looking at what he's doing to worry about how he's thinking.

And the fact is that when you look at his actions and his conduct, he has not taken seriously the fact that we have an adversary, a longstanding adversary, who has been responsible for threats to our democracy.

And Donald Trump refuses and is clearly incapable of speaking out about the nature of that relationship and the response that our country should have when we are attacked in any form.

>> Jonathan Capehart> Senator, are you surprised that there has been relative silence from your Republican colleagues about the president's conduct when it comes to national security?

>> Kamala Harris> Well, you know, Jonathan, I was elected -- bittersweet -- on the same evening as Donald Trump was elected, so I've only known one Senate, and it's the Senate when Donald Trump has been president.

And it has been troubling.

It has been a source of sadness and frustration to see my colleagues on the Republican side not stand up in a way that I believe they would if perhaps Donald Trump weren't president.

I don't understand how, at some point, we each can't feel compelled to put country before party.

So it is deeply troubling, and we need to have an understanding that, especially on issues of national security, that it should be non-partisan.

When we are talking about issues such as a public-health pandemic and crisis, where almost 130,000 lives have been lost in just the last 100 days, that we should all stand up and look at the need for our country to have leadership that sees the problems that we are facing and is focused on the solutions as opposed to the political priorities or threats of a president.

>> Jonathan Capehart> Senator, let's talk about an issue where it seemed like there was going to be bipartisan agreement, and that was on police reform.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was leading the Republican effort on their JUSTICE Act.

But you, along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey -- you signed a letter to the majority leader saying that the JUSTICE Act was -- "It is not salvageable."

Why -- What was wrong with the legislation proposed by Senator Scott?

And why wasn't it possible for all of you to get in a room and negotiate a deal, since there is public sentiment behind doing something to reform the...

>> Kamala Harris> So, it's important to recall the chronology of this, which is that Senator Booker and I proposed, on the Senate side, along with our colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus on the House side, and then it was joined by Senate Democrats and House Democrats and Republicans on the House side, a bill.

But we came up with a bill called the Justice in Policing Act, which would deal with a number of specific issues that relate to the need for accountability and consequence when law-enforcement officers break the rules or break the law.

Nine days later -- nine days later -- the Republicans submit this bill that essentially dealt with nothing in any substantive way that we dealt with in our bill.

In our bill, for example, we banned choke holds and carotid holds.

Were that ban in place, George Floyd would be alive today.

We banned no-knock warrants in drug cases.

Were that in effect, Breonna Taylor would be alive today.

We require that there would be a national standard for use of force so that when an officer uses excessive force, the question would not be, "Was that use of force reasonable?"

, because we know you can reason away anything.

The question instead would be, "Was that use of force necessary?"

We deal with a number of very specific issues.

We say that there should be pattern and practice investigations by the United States Department of Justice, and they should be equipped with subpoena power so that when you have law-enforcement agencies that don't want to cooperate, they have the tool to do the investigation.

The Republican bill, by contrast, did not ban choke holds and carotid holds, did not ban no-knock warrants in drug cases, is not speaking to pattern and practice investigations, is not speaking, as we have, to independent investigations and the need for those, and instead talks about a bunch of studies and bringing people together to have conversations.

Look, we've been having these conversations for decades now.

This is the time to act.

And that's why people by the hundreds of thousands in our country have taken to the streets, people who seemingly have nothing in common, who have been marching together knowing that we cannot have two systems of justice in America and we need to reform the system in tangible ways, not just giving it lip service, but actually putting some teeth into this.

>> Jonathan Capehart> Well, Senator, because almost all policing isn't done at the federal level -- it's done at the state and local level -- in some ways, you were more powerful as D.

A.

of San Francisco or attorney general of California than you are now as a United States senator.

If you were in either of those positions right now, in the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement, what's the one thing you could do, substantively, to reform the police?

>> Kamala Harris> Well, it's a number of the things that we've talked about.

Everything that I just mentioned to you is about creating national standards, and it would definitely regulate, then, federal law enforcement, but it also creates a national standard to support the local activist or the progressive prosecutors or law-enforcement leaders who know that that's where they need to get and they need some more reinforcement to actually get their policies to that standard.

And, so, there is no question that the majority of criminal-justice work is happening at the local level.

There's no question about that.

But that doesn't absolve a need for national standards to, again, create a standard by which everyone should be measured.

>> Jonathan Capehart> So, Senator, this situation that we're in right now reminds me of the gun-control environment in the wake of Newtown, where it seemed like, between public sentiment and action on Capitol Hill, that it was going to be possible for something to be done, and, yet, nothing was done.

And I'm getting the feeling that that might be the case here.

One of the solutions could be -- and it might be the case -- to flip the Senate, have Democrats take control of the Senate.

And I'm asking this question because we have a question from Pennsylvania, from Katherine Betha, and she asks, point-blank, "What are you doing to help flip the Senate?"

>> Kamala Harris> Yeah, well, so, Katherine, you're absolutely right.

That should be one of our main areas of focus, because right now, we, as Democrats, are not in the majority.

And it is really basic about what happens around Capitol Hill and the Senate.

If you're in the majority, you get to write the rules.

You get to decide what bills are going to come up for votes.

You get to decide who will end up serving lifetime appointments on the federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court.

There's a tremendous amount of power in who has the majority in the Senate, so you are right.

We now are in the minority, which means that we don't have control over these things.

And we need to flip the Senate so we can get in the majority so we can have legislation on the floor for a vote that is about meaningful police reform, so that we can have legislation up for a vote that is about addressing the climate crisis, so we can have legislation that is on the floor for a vote around the passage of creating a pathway to citizenship for our immigrants.

These are the things that we need to do.

How do we do it?

Well, one of the things that we need to do is, we need to support the Senate candidates who are going to turn red states blue.

I have a list of who they are.

I have been hosting a lot of the new candidates who are challenging incumbents as a way to introduce them, because the challenge that the new candidates are having is, they are campaigning without planning for it in the midst of a pandemic, so they can't travel.

And so it's important to seek them out.

But let's recognize that we need to take back The White House and elect Joe Biden president and we have got to flip the Senate, because the combination of the two will allow us to really see progress in our country.

>> Jonathan Capehart> I have two quick questions before I know you have a hard out and have to go.

What does it say that the Trump administration is still trying to undo the Affordable Care Act in the middle of a pandemic?

>> Kamala Harris> It just speaks to the heartlessness of the proposal and the perspective.

From day one, the Trump administration has been trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, in large part because they -- And I think Donald Trump wants to undo whatever success and accomplishment was achieved by President Obama and Vice President Biden.

And so they have talked about repeal and replace, but there's been no plan whatsoever for replace.

It's been all about trying to get rid of a public-policy initiative that brought healthcare to over 20 million people.

And to your point, right now, Donald Trump has Bill Barr and the Supreme Court trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act.

If they win, 23 million people in our country will no longer have the healthcare that they need.

And it will also then allow the bans on pre-existing conditions that we had before.

So this is a serious issue in the midst of a pandemic that has killed now over 128,000 people in our country.

And it speaks to the heartlessness, it speaks to the motivation that is about political gain as opposed to what's in the best interests of the health and well-being of the citizens and the people of our country.

>> Jonathan Capehart> Final question.

Shyamala Gopalan was 19 when she came to the United States from India, in 1958, to get a doctorate at Berkeley.

She became a breast-cancer researcher.

She died of cancer in 2009.

And she was your mother.

You wrote in your book, "The Truths We Hold," that you and your sister, Maya, "Rarely earned praise for behavior or achievements that were expected."

So, final question to you, Senator -- what would she say about all the talk that her daughter could be tapped to be Joe Biden's running mate and possibly the next Vice President of the United States?

>> Kamala Harris> You know, my mother was always -- And I, therefore -- I believe you have to focus on what's right in front of you, instead of looking to the thing over there, because the thing that's right in front of you needs your attention.

And right now, my focus, therefore, is on what we need to do around addressing the impact of the coronavirus, in terms of the public-health impact, the economic impact.

My focus is on passing our Justice in Policing Act.

These are the things that are front and center.

This is what's causing people to stand in breadlines around our country, causing people to march in the streets.

This is what I am focused on right now.

>> Jonathan Capehart> That's what you're focused on.

But the question was, what would -- Your mom was always very proud of you.

>> Kamala Harris> And my mother was very practical.

You've not met a more practical person in your life.

She was a fighter and she was practical.

And she would say, "Baby, just focus on what's right in front of you, and the next thing, whatever that's meant to be, will come."

>> Jonathan Capehart> Alright.

Senator Kamala Harris of California, thank you very much for coming back to the podcast and for being here.

>> Kamala Harris> Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Good to see you, Jonathan.

>> Jonathan Capehart> Thanks for listening to "Cape Up."

Tune in every Tuesday.

You can find us on Apple podcasts and Stitcher.

And how about doing me a huge favor?

Subscribe, rate, and review us.

I'm Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post.

You can find me on Twitter @CapehartJ.



https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/c358731d-b3c9-445c-815e-6c5bd3854acc_5f038f3046e0fb0007aadf68-transcript.txt

Julie Depenbrock

Opinion writer Jonathan Capehart talks with newsmakers who challenge your ideas on politics, and explore how race, religion, age, gender and cultural identity are redrawing the lines that both divide and unite America.

Cape Up: a Washington Post opinions podcast

Harris, a Democratic senator from California, also discussed during a live taping of Cape Up the coronavirus pandemic and the explosive allegation that Russia was paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. troops.

Kamala Harris: 'This is the time to act' on police reform — and those reforms need teeth

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