Harris opposes US Steel's sale to a Japanese firm during joint Pennsylvania event with Biden
World
Biden took the stage first and was met with chants of Thank You, Joe
PITTSBURGH (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris used a joint campaign appearance with President Joe Biden in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania on Monday to say that U.S. Steel should remain domestically owned — concurring with the White House’s monthslong opposition to the company’s planned sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel.
Her comments came during a rally before cheering union members marking Labor Day in the industrial city of Pittsburgh, where Harris said U.S. Steel was “an historic American company and it is vital for our country to maintain strong American steel companies.”
“U.S. Steel should remain American-owned and American-operated, and I will always have the backs of America’s steelworkers,” she said.
That echoes Biden, who repeated Monday what he’s said since March — that he opposes U.S. Steel’s would-be sale to Nippon, believing it would hurt the country’s steelworkers. It also overlaps with Republican former President Donald Trump. It’s little surprise that Harris would agree with Biden on the issue, but it nonetheless constitutes a major policy position for the vice president, who has offered relatively few of them since Biden abandoned his reelection bid and endorsed his vice president in July.
Biden took the stage first and was met with chants of “Thank You, Joe” as he and Harris appeared in an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers hall.
The president called Harris the only “rational” choice for president in November. He said choosing her to be vice president was the “single best” decision of his presidency and told the union members that electing her will be “the best decision you will ever make.”
Biden also started to say, “Kamala Harris and I are going to build on this” as if he were still running and she was his running mate — but he corrected himself. It underscored just how much the race has changed and how Harris has been careful to balance presenting herself as “a new way forward” while remaining intensely loyal to Biden and the policies he has pushed.
Her delivery is very different — and in some cases she’s pushed to move faster than Biden’s administration — but the overall goal of expanding government programs to buoy the middle class is the same.
“We know this is going to be a tight race till the very end,” Harris told the Pittsburgh crowd.
The joint rally with Biden was Harris’ second of the day and followed Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade, one of the country’s largest. It was their first joint appearance at a campaign event since the election shakeup six weeks ago.
Harris opened her Labor Day campaigning solo with an event in Detroit, where hundreds of audience members wore bright yellow union shirts and hoisted “Union strong” signs. The vice president said “every person in our nation has benefited” from unions’ work.
“Everywhere I go, I tell people, ‘Look, you may not be a union member, you’d better thank a union member,” Harris said, noting that collective bargaining by organized labor helped secure the five-day work week, sick pay and other key benefits and solidify safer working conditions.
When that event was over, Biden and Harris rode back to the airport together in the presidential limo. Air Force One and Air Force Two subsequently took off within moments of each other to return to suburban Washington — though the president and vice president never travel on the same plane for continuity of government reasons, just in case of an air emergency.
