Kamala Harris to make first trip to Iowa since becoming vice president

CNN
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Vice President Kamala Harris to make her first trip to Iowa on Thursday since taking office at an abortion rights event, This was reported to CNN by a spokesman for the White House.

Harris will travel to Des Moines to convene a roundtable with local leaders on the fight for reproductive rights.

The high-profile last-minute trip comes after a flurry of activity from Republican presidential candidates who arrived for an early caucus, such as former president and current candidate Donald Trump and potential 2024 Republican Party nominee Ron DeSantis. GOP politicians have begun wooing caucuses who advocate personal politicking as the state intends to play its traditional role in launching the party’s 2024 nomination contest.

President Joe Biden, who is expected to run for re-election in 2024, was absent from the state after urging National Democrats to replace the nation’s first caucuses in Iowa with South Carolina, the core state with majority black Democratic voters. , which prompted him to be nominated in 2020. The Democratic National Committee passed the president’s amendments last month, but the vice president’s visit to Iowa underscores that Democrats have no intention of abandoning the state entirely, despite its Republican tendencies.

Harris’ trip also comes a day after the federal judge overseeing the challenge to the federal government’s approval of the medical abortion drug holds a hearing on the case. The vice president became the Biden administration’s chief envoy on the issue after the Supreme Court overturned the ruling against Rowe. Last summer, Wade said there was no longer a federal constitutional right to have an abortion.

This week, she criticized the attacks on medical abortion and warned that preventing doctors from prescribing mifepristone, the first drug in the medical abortion process, could have wider implications.

“But if extremists and politicians can bypass FDA approval and take one drug off the shelves — in this case, an abortion drug — one has to wonder: what drug will be next?” Harris said in a recent press conference with local media and coalition agencies.

Harris has led dozens of abortion access events since last year, meeting with abortion rights activists and state legislators in crimson and swing states.

Recently, Republicans in the Iowa House of Representatives introduced a bill banning all abortions in the state and defining that life begins at conception. Last year, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution does not protect the right to abortion, leaving room for the state’s Republican legislative majority to take stricter action on abortion.

This story has been updated with additional details.