‘This is not the 1950s’: Harris defends her family and responds to critics on podcast

Vice President Harris defended her family following attacks in a new podcast interview that came out Sunday.

Harris was asked by host Alex Cooper on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast about comments from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) last month in which she said the vice president “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble” due to her lack of biological children.

In her response, Harris said “family comes in many forms, and I think that, increasingly, you know, all of us understand that, you know, this is not the 1950s anymore.” 

“Families come in all kinds of shapes and forms, and they’re family nonetheless,” Harris added.

Harris’s husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, went after Sanders for the comments last month at a campaign event in Brooklyn, N.Y.

“Somehow because Cole and Ella [Emhoff] aren’t Kamala’s quote-unquote biological children, that she doesn’t have anything in her life to keep her humble,” Emhoff said.

“As if keeping women humble, whether you have children or not, is something we should strive for. It is not,” Emhoff continued. “But I’ll tell you what, going back to that debate, Kamala sure kept Trump humble at that debate, didn’t she, because that’s what this is really about.”

In her “Call Her Daddy” interview, Harris also responded to comments from Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, from 2021 in which he said the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

“I just think it’s mean and mean-spirited,” Harris said. “And, I think that most Americans want leaders who understand that the measure of their strength is not based on who you beat down. The real measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up.”

Vance said the 2021 comments were “sarcastic” in late July. 

“We think it’s ‘mean spirited’ that Kamala Harris created crushing inflation, opened the border to drugs and criminals, and allowed the world to fall into chaos,” Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Vance, said in an emailed statement to The Hill. “Kamala Harris has a record of failure and her purposely taking JD’s words out of context won’t change that fact.”

In another emailed statement to The Hill, Sanders said she “would never criticize a woman for not having children, the point I was making and that Kamala Harris confirmed by her own admission is that she doesn’t believe our leaders should be humble, which explains her arrogant claim that she alone can fix our nation’s problems after spending the last four years making them worse.”

Updated at 10:49 pm EDT.