When Vice President Kamala Harris learned the Supreme Court had reversed Roe, eliminating a constitutional right to an abortion and a half century of precedent, she quickly called her husband. “I was like, they bleep did it,” she recalled in an interview this week in her ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive building. “I was so upset,” she added. “I first had to release that feeling in an appropriate place, and then my team, we just roundtabled around what we need to do and what this means. I was actually on my way to a maternal mortality event, and the connection between these two issues is profound. The same people jumping up and down as proponents of Dobbs [have] been virtually silent on the fact that women in America are dying every day in connection with childbirth.”

The Dobbs decision, in June, was one of the most crucial moments of Harris’s historic term as vice president, which began in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, attacks and is now approaching the midway point, a time to reflect on challenges and accomplishments, such as the passing of the Respect for Marriage Act—a bill that became more urgent in light of Clarence Thomas threatening same-sex marriage rights while striking down Roe. “The same people who are attacking reproductive rights are the same people who are attacking voting rights,” said Harris. “Which was in many ways the impetus for the beautiful occasion we had here.” At last week’s White House signing ceremony, Harris told the celebratory crowd that “because you made your voices heard, marriages are more secure and Joe Biden is our president.”

Sitting across from Harris had me thinking about how I’ve devoted a good deal of my life to analyzing how the media, and Americans more generally, treat powerful women. And here is the most powerful woman—quite literally one heartbeat away from the presidency. She is the first female, first Black and first South Asian American vice president. But before that, she was the first female district attorney in San Francisco and first female attorney general of California. “In this year of our Lord 2022, it is a shame that we are still making firsts,” Harris said, recalling how her mother would say that while she “may be the first to do many things,” she should make sure she’s not the last. “That’s why it is very important to me to make sure that I create a path and widen the path for others,” she said.

But despite such achievements, it occurs to me during our interview that the vice president of the United States is actually trying to make me feel comfortable. Perhaps it’s a function of the world we all inhabit, but the female vice president is way friendlier and more accommodating than a man in her position would ever be. There is an anxiety in her office—the staff is obsessive about getting every last detail right. No one says it to me explicitly, but you can sense in the carefulness and precision of every word and gesture that the success of the vice president is about more than just her. Harris is saddled with the burden of being first. Anything she does will attract more scrutiny, anything she doesn’t do will attract more scorn. There is a tension that permeates the world surrounding her. Being first is never comfortable.

And yet, Harris seems relaxed as we get chatting, starting off with some small talk about wedding photography, of all things, as well as feminism, which led me to mention that my mom is the writer Erica Jong. “That’s your mom?” she said. “Nobody tells me anything around here!” In the course of the interview, we discussed persistent challenges, like immigration, Democrats’ success in the midterms, and her relationship with Biden, along with apparently one more first: how she and husband Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, placed a mezuzah at the entry of the vice-presidential residency at the Naval Observatory.

While the Dobbs decision sent shock waves through the nation, it didn’t come as a complete surprise. Harris recalled how she was slated to speak to EMILY’s List in early May, an event that occurred the night after Politico reported on a leaked draft decision indicating the conservative majority on the court was poised to strike down the landmark ruling. “I just gave a pretty spontaneous speech, saying, ‘How dare they?’” Harris said. “In terms of just an expression of the outrage I think we all felt.”

But I wanted to know if she saw the fall of Roe coming. I expected that after the Supreme Court failed to act on SB8 (the bill that banned abortion after about six weeks in the state of Texas) that she might have assumed Roe would be overturned. “You brace for any major catastrophe. I think it’s human nature that we retained some element of hope that this couldn’t happen because it would be so awful if it did. That’s how I think about this issue, that it couldn’t happen because I’m acutely aware of how many people will be hurt in a significant way if it did. That was kind of just mentally and emotionally where I was, which is eyes open that it could happen, but also believing this can’t happen. Then, of course, when the leaked decision came down, that was it.”

The former prosecutor pulled opinions related to Roe and started strategizing. “In that opinion, shocking but not shocking, that Justice Clarence Thomas said the quiet part out loud—that marriage, that right to contraception was very much at risk.” (Thomas’s concurring opinion also raised concerns the court could target sodomy laws.) Since Harris had experience as a state AG, where she helped beat back Califorina’s 2008 proposed same-sex marriage ban Propostion 8, she was quick to turn to the states, telling me how governors had been partners with the Biden administration when it came to reproductive health, such as Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker and Wisconsin’s Tony Evers, who’s “going to veto what he has to, he’s going to do it right.”

The fall of Roe triggered a near-total abortion ban in Wisconsin based on a 173-year-old law which Evers spoke out against while running for reelection. His four-point victory in Wisconsin, where Republican Ron Johnson also won reelection, was “unbelievable,” I remarked. “He won by being boring.”

“That’s exactly right,” said Harris. “That was part of it.”

Then Harris stepped back. “You talked about your mom. I grew up a child of the Civil Rights Movement, and a big part of the methodology and the success of that movement was coalition-building, bringing folks together to understand what they have in common.” Since the court was sending abortion rights to the states, she said, “we need to get out of DC and go and support and be with leaders in the states. I convened state legislators in red states and blue states to one, remind them they weren’t out here fighting alone, but to also see what I could do, to bring my platform and whatever cameras and voice I could bring, to uplift and highlight the incredible work that they’re doing at a state level.”

Speaking of governors, I tried to get Harris to talk about Ron DeSantis and his new extreme six-week abortion ban. She pursed her lips and said nothing about DeSantis, but spoke more broadly about the GOP’s fixation on banning and restricting abortion rights. “That’s what it is. It’s extreme, and it is disconnected with where the majority of Americans are on this issue,” she said. “Let’s be clear about that. That was one of the points I was making throughout that time of leading up to the midterms. You look what happened in Kentucky, you look what happened in Kansas, completely disconnected from where the majority of Americans are.”

“One does not have to abandon their faith to agree that the government should not be telling her what to do with her body,” she added. “Let her make that decision, if she chooses, with her pastor or her priest, her rabbi, with her loved ones. But the government shouldn’t be telling her what to do with her body.”

In the months between the fall of Roe and the midterms, Harris held a number of roundtable discussions about women’s reproductive health with political leaders and voters. Naysayers said it was tone-deaf and all Americans cared about was inflation and gas prices. The naysayers were wrong. I asked her if she felt vindicated given that abortion was a major concern among voters.

“No, because the issue is still a really big issue,” she said. “I will tell you that I spent the majority of my career, not in Washington, DC, but as a prosecutor, and a majority of that time was a focus on what we need to do to protect women and children and keep them safe and be concerned about their well-being. For me, this is part of the lifelong commitment to these issues, but it is also about understanding that there are, right now on this issue, some very powerful people that are trampling on the rights of some of the most vulnerable people in our country. Anyone who is faced with that kind of situation should be surrounded by people who want to support her, people who want to reinforce her self-determination and sense of empowerment, to have the ability, and that we would respect and trust her, to know how to make a decision based on what’s in her best interest, instead of these so-called leaders deciding they’re in a better position to know what’s in her self-interest.”

Republicans have seized on immigration as a favorite cudgel against the Biden administration, and Harris in particular, with Texas governor Greg Abbott dropping several buses full of migrants at the door of her Naval Observatory residence. With controversial Trump-era border restrictions expected to soon end, along with Republicans taking control of the House next month, the spotlight on how the administration is addressing immigration is only likely to grow. Some House Republicans are already calling to impeach Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

So I wanted to give Harris the opportunity to walk me through the administration’s dealings with Mexico, and South and Central America. “The focus is on the northern part of Central America. It’s Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, because at the time that the president asked me to lead on the root-causes issue, which is why are people leaving that area, we were seeing a lot of the migration that was coming to the United States from that area,” she said.

Harris explained to me that the goal was to support people where they are, so they don’t need to leave their homes. “I think one of the things that we were able to do in the last two years is I led, basically, a focus on root causes, doing it in a way that is, again, something I’ve done my entire career, understanding the power of a public-private partnership to actually have impact, which I love to do. Bringing together CEOs and business leaders to say, hey, you guys have resources and skill and expertise in certain areas, and coupling that with the bandwidth and the scope of what we can do as government, can be very powerful to have a very focused ability to look at the solutions to a problem. For example, I brought together CEOs, and as of now, we call it a call to action, we’ve raised $3.2 billion that has gone to that area, the northern part of Central America, to deal with things like small business, like entrepreneurs, women.”

This idea of public-private partnerships is something Harris’s team is particularly committed to. During our meeting she told me about time spent working on community banks and banks focused on the problems in developing areas. Still the root causes of migration aren’t going to be solved with a few billion dollars in investments. Harris told me, “A large part of the issue that is affecting that region, and really globally, we’re seeing these migration changes, because if you couple the pandemic, what it caused in terms of a crash to the economy, and you include the climate crisis, and what that has meant to those economies because so many of these countries are agricultural-based in terms of not only their industry and therefore they’re income, but if you can’t grow food, you can’t eat. That’s about food insecurity, and if you can’t eat where you live, you leave.”

Harris has met a number of times with Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. You’ll remember Mexico as the country that Trump had been fantasizing about bombing and making pay for a border wall (or at least that’s how 2016 campaign chants went). Harris told me about her relationship with López Obrador. “I’ve been, as vice president, to 14 countries, and the trip to Mexico and then his travels here, we’ve gotten to know each other. Mexico wants to be considered, rightly, as a partner on this issue because so many of the migrants that we’re seeing coming from Central America are coming through Mexico. We’ve had partnership around what we need to do to stem the flow in a way that addresses the need for a humane and thoughtful approach to the issue.”

Plus, she noted, “CEOs will tell you this every day of the week, they need immigration.”

“They need people to work,” I noted.

“The problem here is that we don’t have a Congress that is willing to actually approach this in a reasonable way,” she responded. And “ultimately,” she added. “Congress has to act.”

One of the favorite DC parlor games is to speculate on the relationship between the president and vice president, with Politico reporting this week on a forthcoming book describing tensions between the two offices. Harris, however, only spoke favorably of her experience with Biden.

“It’s a great relationship. We get on so well. We’re real partners. We have a lot in common that people would know,” she said. “Family is very important to both of us. We are both of us lifelong public servants and really care about real people. I started my career, and most of my career was in local and state government. He started in local government, so he and I will often be almost singing in unison about, what does this mean to real people? We both feel very strongly about that. We come at our work from a very similar orientation; worrying about working people, worrying about working families. We just like each other a lot. We just like each other. It’s really nice. It’s really nice. I feel very fortunate to have this relationship. It matters because then we can be partners in a very significant way, not just in name only, to work on these issues.”

She mentioned family, and as a largely secular Jew myself living through a period of rising antisemitism, I told her there was something meaningful about having her husband, who is Jewish, living in the Naval Observatory. “We had a big Hanukkah party last night,” Harris told me, while also mentioning she believed the couple was the first to put a mezuzah on the house of the vice president. “When we put up the mezuzah, my in-laws came, and they’re originally from Brooklyn, and they are exactly what you would know and expect,” Harris said.

“She would have to be very pleased, your mother-in-law,” I remarked.

“Oh, yes. My mother-in-law, Barbara, is very pleased and proud of her son. My father-in-law is equally pleased. My father-in-law, he’s an artist, so he’s got this coexisting thing, which my husband has, of being very kind and being very strong. Sometimes he just tears up about it all, especially when Doug did the convening for the summit on antisemitism because here he is, this kid from Brooklyn, started with nothing, my father-in-law, and his son is doing this work that could and does and will impact millions of people.”