VP Kamala Harris rallies Democrats, affirms support for abortion rights during Austin visit

One month before the midterm elections, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris came to Republican Texas on Saturday, aiming to buck up a state party that hasn't seen a statewide victory in a generation and still faces headwinds caused by economic uncertainty and unchecked migration across its southern border.

Still, Harris pushed an optimistic message that highlighted the national party's slogan of "Democrats deliver" and urged Texas Democrats at their annual JJ Reception in Austin to embrace Biden administration successes on a range of legislation such as lowering prescription drug prices, spending on infrastructure renewal projects and providing COVID-19 relief.

"Democrats stood on the floor and delivered relief to the American people," Harris told attendees at the JJ Reception, named for the late President Lyndon B. Johnson and the late U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan. "People are suffering."

The first woman ever elected on a national ticket also used her two stops in Austin to champion efforts to restore the reproductive freedoms that were struck down when the Supreme Court on June 24 overturned the landmark 1973 case Roe v. Wade, which had affirmed the right to abortion.

Before the reception, Harris appeared at the LBJ Presidential Library on the University of Texas campus, where she affirmed her support for abortion rights and likened the effort to restore them to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, which helped define the 36th president's administration.

She said the recent high court ruling that struck down the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy "has profound ramifications."

"At its core, this is about freedom, liberty," Harris said during a question-and-answer session. "And on every level."

She reminded the 200-plus invited guests inside the library's 10th-floor Atrium Room that the midterm elections are one month away and that "it matters" who gets elected up and down the ballot.

She also cast the abortion issue in generational terms.

"We have a 23-year-old daughter, and I have an 83-year-old mother-in-law," she said. "Our daughters will have fewer rights than my mother-in-law did."

At the reception, Harris denounced Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's support for the Texas law that now forbids abortion with no exception for rape or incest as "radical" and stated that Texas must "elect Beto O'Rourke as governor." However, the Democratic nominee and former congressman from El Paso did not attend either function in Austin.

A spokesman said O'Rourke was sticking to his long-planned "weekend of blockwalking" campaign schedule.

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Abbott's campaign derided the vice president's Texas visit, saying her agenda in the state was misguided.

"Instead of coming to Texas to fundraise for border crisis denier Beto O’ Rourke, the vice president should take time to visit the border to see firsthand the complete disaster she and the president created," Abbott spokesman Mark Miner said.

Abbott, seeking a third term as governor, has made illegal immigration a central theme of his reelection effort. Harris was tasked early on with being the Biden administration's point person on immigration — specifically, as The Associated Press reported at the time, "to oversee diplomatic efforts to deal with issues spurring migration in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as pressing them to strengthen enforcement on their own borders."

The task also includes finding a "long-term strategy that gets at the root causes of migration from those countries."

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Harris made little mention of immigration during her Austin visit. But she did reaffirm the administration's commitment to establish a pathway to citizenship for the children of immigrants who came into the United States without legal authorization "because America is their home."

In September, Harris was in Houston, where she chaired the National Space Council and toured a space vehicle mock-up facility. And last year, she visited El Paso, where she toured Border Patrol facilities as a burgeoning crisis in unauthorized immigration was beginning.

Harris' loudest applause from the Democrats was when she reminded them of Biden's recent action pardoning people who were convicted of simple possession of marijuana in federal cases.

"The bottom line is no one should have to go to jail for smoking weed," she said.

This article originally appeared on Corpus Christi Caller Times: Kamala Harris brings 'Democrats deliver' message to Austin