Kamala Harris didn’t have a whole lot of time to get to know Tim Walz before asking him to join her on the Democrats’ 2024 presidential ticket. The pair met for an in-person interview over the weekend, but Harris also had at least one recent experience with the Minnesota governor to draw on as she mulled her choice.
In March, Walz was at Harris’ side during one of the most important moments in her tenure as vice president: a tour of St. Paul’s Planned Parenthood health center — the first visit a sitting VP has ever made to a clinic that provides abortion care.
In the wake of the Dobbs decision, Harris emerged as the Biden administration’s strongest messenger on reproductive rights — in stark contrast to the Catholic president who opposed abortion for much of his career, and struggled to even utter the word itself. In that role, Harris toured the country, raising awareness about the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision, and speaking to women and health care providers in states where abortion access had dried up or disappeared entirely.
“I have heard stories of — and have met with women who had miscarriages in toilets,” Harris said in March. “Women who were being denied emergency care because the health care providers there, at an emergency room, were afraid that because of the laws in their state, that they could be criminalized, sent to prison for providing health care.”
But she was in St. Paul that day with a different agenda, she said: to demonstrate the positive case for what reproductive policy could look like in America.
“I’m here at this health care clinic to uplift the work that is happening in Minnesota as an example of what true leadership looks like, which is to understand it is only right and fair that people have access to the health care they need and that they have access to health care in an environment where they are treated with dignity and respect,” Harris said.
Walz, the person responsible for that work, was standing behind her. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision ended federal protections for abortion rights, Walz became the first governor in the country to sign new legislation enshrining the right to abortion into law.
“The message that we’re sending to Minnesota today is very clear: Your rights are protected in this state,” Walz said in January 2023. “You have the right to make your own decisions about your health, your family and your life.”
Last year, Walz also signed legislation that expanded health insurance coverage for abortion, increased funding for reproductive health organizations, and eliminated a mandatory 24-hour waiting period, parental consent rules and other barriers to care.
In June of this year, when Iowa passed a six-week ban on abortion, Walz reminded Iowans of his state’s commitment to maintaining access. “To our neighbors in Iowa: Minnesota is and will remain a safe haven for reproductive freedom,” he wrote on X.
Walz has long been a champion for reproductive rights since he ran for office the very first time in 2006 — in a rural congressional district that had elected precisely one other Democrat since 1892. On a candidate questionnaire he filled out that year, Walz indicated his belief that abortion “should always be legal.”
His opponent in that first Congressional race, a six-term incumbent, had voted for a law banning many abortions later in pregnancy. Walz said at the time he opposed that bill “because we know when you start to criminalize it, that has nothing to do with reduction of abortions.”
Walz won that race, and went on to serve six terms in the House, earning 100 percent voting scores from NARAL and Planned Parenthood, before launching a campaign for Minnesota governor. Campaigning in that race, Walz declared proudly: “My record is so pro-choice Nancy Pelosi asked if I should tone it down. I stand with Planned Parenthood!”
Introducing Walz to supporters in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Harris cited Walz’s work as champion for reproductive freedom, and declared a commitment to protecting that freedom would be central to the Harris-Walz campaign.
“Tim and I have a message for Trump and others who want to turn back the clock on our fundamental freedoms: We’re not going back,” she said, igniting a chant that reverberated around the stadium. “We’re not going back.”
Walz used the opportunity, as he was introduced to the world that night, to talk about his family’s experience with in vitro fertilization — another type of reproductive care that Republicans have been targeting.
“In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make, even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves. There’s a golden rule: mind your own damn business… that includes IVF,” Walz said.
He went on to speak about the years of agonizing fertility treatments. “I remember praying every night for a call for good news, the pit in my stomach when the phone rang, and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn’t worked,” Walz said. “It wasn’t by chance that when we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope.”
Aug. 9, 9 a.m.: This post has been updated to include a video from Walz’s 2018 campaign for governor.
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”