Vice President Kamala Harris claimed on Sunday that the United States’s “democracy” was the biggest national security challenge it faces.
During an interview with CBS News’s Face the Nation, host Margaret Brennan asked her which national security threat concerned her the most.
“Frankly, one of them is our democracy,” Harris replied in what appeared to be a misstatement.
However, the rest of her response did not make sense either.
“There is, I think, no question in the minds of people who are foreign policy experts that the year 2021 is not the year 2000,” Harris continued. “And we are embarking on a new era where the threats to our nation take many forms—including the threat of autocracies taking over and having outsized influence around the world.”
Later in the interview, she clarified that the U.S. needs to “fight for the integrity of our democracy.”
“[P]eople around the world watch what we do as America, because we have held ourselves out to be a model of the efficacy of the ability of a democracy to coexist with an economic strength and power,” she said.
Harris went on to claim that U.S. democracy as we know it might end if Democrats are unable to pass a controversial voting rights bill that would undermine states’ efforts to secure their elections.
“Right now, we’re about to take ourselves off the map as a role model, if we let … people destroy one of the most important pillars of a democracy, which is free and fair elections,” Harris claimed.
Democratic leadership is hoping to end the Senate’s filibuster, a legislative stall tactic that requires the majority party to reach 60 votes in order to move forward with legislation, to pass the voting rights bill.
However, Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., have previously said they would oppose any efforts to kill the filibuster.
