Harris says she opposes US Steel’s sale to Japanese firm

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 US Steel should remain domestically owned — concurring with the White House’s monthslong opposition to the company’s planned sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel, Report informs referring to CNBC.

Her comments came during a rally before cheering union members marking Labor Day in the industrial city of Pittsburgh, where Harris said US Steel was “an historic American company and it is vital for our country to maintain strong American steel companies.”

“US 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.