AP

Former Vice President Joe Biden and then-candidate Sen. Kamala Harris shake hands after a Sept. 12, 2019 primary debate. On Tuesday, Mr. Biden selected Senator Harris as his running mate.

California Sen. Kamala Harris has spent a career shattering glass ceilings. On Tuesday, she made history as America’s first Black female presidential running mate on a major party ticket, joining former Vice President Joe Biden in the Democrats’ bid for the White House. Those who know the former prosecutor describe her as a smart, disciplined politician who relates well to voters, cares deeply about people, and is a prodigious fundraiser. On Twitter, Mr. Biden called her “a fearless fighter for the little guy.”

When asked to name her core attribute, friends and advisers invariably describe her as “tough” – “like a burning nuclear reactor,” as one former staffer put it.

The question is whether this quality is what Mr. Biden needs at this pivotal moment of deep national divide and economic and health crisis.

Many friends and supporters think so, including Lita Rosario, who has known Ms. Harris since they were students decades ago at Howard University. Back then, Ms. Rosario noticed how Kamala (pronounced comma-la) stuck to her guns in political discussions in the campus yard, wielding argument and logic like a rhetorical sword. Ms. Rosario recruited her to the college debate team.

“I don’t think Mike Pence has a chance,” she says of the expected vice presidential debate. Many Americans may remember Senator Harris’ prosecutorial questioning of then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in 2017. She grilled him on his dealings with Russia on behalf of the Trump campaign. “I am not able to be rushed this fast. It makes me nervous,” he told the senator.

“Kamala was, in some ways, bred in a lab for these tough confrontations – whether in a hearing or on a vice presidential debate stage. There is nobody better than her,” says another former staffer, who faults Democrats for often being too “civil” when democracy is at stake.

But the freshman senator does not have a long history of legislative coalition building, across the aisle or even within her own party. And to some observers, the senator’s intense ambition could be a possible threat to a President Biden, if her own political interests ever diverge from his. 

Former Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who led Mr. Biden’s vice presidential search committee, reportedly had grave misgivings about Ms. Harris’ lack of remorse over her surprise attack on Mr. Biden during a Democratic debate last June. He was said to favor Rep. Karen Bass of Los Angeles as a more loyal No. 2. 

Robert Shrum, a former adviser to Mr. Biden who’s no longer in the consulting business, refutes the argument that there’s something wrong with being “smart and ambitious,” calling the criticism “sexist.” Lyndon Johnson was ambitious, he reminds.

In his view, Ms. Harris’ biggest problem during her own presidential campaign was that she couldn’t get her message straight. Now, the Biden camp will determine the message. “I don’t think she will go off and freelance,” he says. “That’s just not her style.”

The senator is a savvy politician who knows how to play to television cameras, can help redress 2016’s decline in Black turnout in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and would bring experience leading a large, statewide justice department to bear in a Biden administration, says Mr. Shrum, who leads the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California.

Despite having spent only four years in the Senate, Ms. Harris “knows how the levers of power are exercised,” says Nathan Barankin, who served as her chief of staff when she came to the Senate and, before that, as her chief deputy attorney general. Most of her career – as district attorney for San Francisco and as state attorney general – has been in executive positions, he points out.

She’ll be a particularly good governing partner for Mr. Biden, Mr. Barankin maintains, adding that her “affection for Joe Biden is deep and sincere,” the debate ambush notwithstanding. Except for her Senate swearing-in ceremony, where then-Vice President Biden pointed out that he’d lobbied (successfully) to get her on key committees like Homeland Security and Intelligence, their tenures in Washington did not overlap. But she got to know the former vice president through her friendship with his late son, Beau, when they were both attorneys general, fighting it out with the big banks in the mortgage crisis.

Senator Harris has repeatedly cited her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, as the most important influence in her life – a strong and courageous woman who left her native India to pursue graduate medical studies at the University of California at Berkeley. There, she met and fell in love with Donald Harris, who had immigrated from Jamaica to study economics. They married and were both active in the civil rights movement, taking Kamala, born in Oakland in 1964, in her stroller to marches.

After her parents divorced, it was her mother who raised her and her younger, sister Maya, who last year ran the senator’s presidential campaign. In her memoir, the senator describes her mother cooking dinner to the music of Aretha Franklin, while Kamala danced in the living room. They listened to Ms. Franklin’s version of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” all the time.

“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters ... and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women,” writes Ms. Harris.

Political activism ran in her mother’s family. In India, the senator’s grandmother never attended high school, but was a community organizer who sheltered women who were abused by their husbands – and called the husbands and read them the riot act. Her grandfather was part of the movement for Indian independence and became a senior diplomat.

Ms. Harris’ mother pushed her and her sister “hard,” but also nurtured them and was a lot of fun, the senator writes. That, too, influenced her, friends say. She’s tough, but has “that sense of caring, that kind of motherly instinct,” says Ms. Rosario, who is now an entertainment attorney. While no longer in close contact with her college friend, the lawyer says the senator offered her comfort and encouragement after the loss of her mother in 2018.

“She said that she had gone through the same thing, and that those feelings of pain I had been feeling ... would eventually turn to good things,” Ms. Rosario recalls. “I thought that was very poignant and true.”

The former Harris staffer who likened her to a nuclear reactor says that intensity burns in all aspects of her life, whether it’s work or relationships – or even cooking, another passion. She’ll express disappointment in work that doesn’t live up to her standards, but typically softens the criticism with a hug. She’ll call her friends on their birthdays and sing to them. She has been known to call into radio cooking shows with advice on how to brine a chicken. On the night that musician Prince died – she was a huge fan – she and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, danced for hours to his music in their backyard.

In her work, “she drills down into the human experience,” wanting to know what impact policies will have on individuals, says Mr. Barankin. That trait was evidenced in her effort to reduce recidivism in San Francisco, creating the Back on Track program for first-time, nonviolent drug offenders. It put them through job training and community service instead of in jail – a radical concept at the time.

Other aspects of her law enforcement record have come under heavy criticism, with many progressives accusing her of inaction on matters of police misconduct and police killings. How that might influence Black voters in this time of heightened awareness over policing is hard to say, though the senator is also a co-sponsor of police reform legislation that would bar chokeholds, racial profiling, and no-knock warrants.

California political analyst Phil Trounstine recently described Senator Harris as having “positions, not convictions,” calling her a “successful climber who has almost always done only what is best for herself at virtually every turn.” And yet, he says of all the candidates who were in the running to be Joe Biden’s Joe Biden, she is clearly the best choice.

“With the right seasoning – acting as No. 2, taking direction from the president and handling tasks given her – Harris could develop into someone who is a believable president. She’s the right age, demographic, and gender; she has a national following and reputation; she’s experienced and deft on the campaign trail, and she just might help boost the Black vote in Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.”

Mr. Biden certainly hopes so. 

Susan Walsh/AP

President Donald Trump prepares to sign four executive actions during a news conference at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Aug. 8, 2020. The president claimed the authority to defer payroll taxes and extend an expired unemployment benefit after negotiations with Congress on a new coronavirus rescue package stalled.

Flourishing a pen, President Donald Trump attempted an end run around stalled congressional negotiations Saturday, signing a series of executive actions he said would “pretty much” take care of the nation’s coronavirus relief needs.

Days later, U.S. states and companies are struggling to figure out how – or whether – to implement the president’s directives.

As with many of Mr. Trump’s unilateral domestic moves, a close reading of the documents shows that the details don’t quite match the sweeping claims. The executive actions he approved appear to be, at best, less than meets the eye – and, at worst, unworkable. Some may also be illegal.

The unemployment memorandum, for instance, requires that hard-pressed states kick in 25% of the extended $400 weekly per-person benefit. Some Democratic governors were scathing about the chance of that happening.

“The concept of saying to states that you pay 25% of the unemployment insurance is just laughable,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “The executive orders will not be a substitute for legislation.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, all our coronavirus coverage is free. No paywall.

It’s possible the document signings were as much a negotiating tactic as an end in themselves. On Monday Mr. Trump and senior administration officials pressed Democrats to return to the bargaining table. On his Twitter feed, the president claimed that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now “want to make a deal. Amazing how it all works, isn’t it.”

But the two Democratic leaders said they had not contacted the White House, and, as of Tuesday, no further negotiations were scheduled – though both sides said they remained open to discussions. On the bottom-line cost, the two sides remained far apart. Democrats were seeking relief worth about $2 trillion, down from an initial $3.4 trillion target. Republicans have countered with a package worth $1 trillion.

Here are three questions sparked by the president’s weekend moves:

What, exactly, did President Trump sign? 

On Saturday at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club the president proclaimed that he was going to sign “bills” that would “take care of, pretty much, this entire situation” (meaning Congress’ failure to agree on a relief package).

He announced he was postponing payroll taxes through the end of the year, extending extra federal unemployment benefits, helping people stay in their homes, and waiving payments on federal student loans.

The documents the president signed weren’t bills, a term generally reserved for legislation passed by Congress. He signed one executive order on housing, and three presidential memorandums, which carry less legal weight.

On housing, Mr. Trump’s order did not extend the federal ban on many evictions, which expired in late July. Instead, it called for top administration housing officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, to “consider” whether a new eviction ban is necessary.

On unemployment benefits, Mr. Trump’s memorandum extended extra federal payments. But the amount was cut to $400 a week, from the previous level of $600 – and of that, states would have to supply $100. The memo’s wording holds that if a state can’t ante up that cash – and many will be hard-pressed to afford it – it won’t get the federal supplement.

On payroll taxes, Mr. Trump’s memo instructs the Treasury to stop collection of the 6.2% paycheck levy from Sept. 1 to Dec. 31. But it’s a deferment, not a tax cut – meaning that at the end of the year, taxpayers (or their employers) would have to pay the full amount for that period of time.

On federally held student loans, Mr. Trump’s memo waives all interest until the end of the year, and delays principal payments until Dec. 31. On Jan. 1, normal payment schedules are supposed to restart. 

What happens next? 

Court challenges may delay implementation of some or all of these moves. But the main challenge may be that the executive actions are so narrow and complicated, particularly for the unemployment payments and payroll tax deferments, that many states and businesses will likely struggle to figure out what exactly to do.

Take the extension of federal unemployment benefits, arguably the most important of all Mr. Trump’s actions. States are supposed to pay $100 a week per person of the cost, and administer the effort besides. If they can’t afford that, will they get nothing? The memo’s wording suggests that would be the case, but on Tuesday administration officials backed up a bit and clarified the situation. White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said states would be able to credit $100 of their existing unemployment benefits toward the 25% cost-sharing requirement. States would still have to apply for the benefit, according to Mr. Kudlow.

Plus, the unemployment memo draws on federal disaster funds as its source of money. At current levels of unemployment, the disaster money would be used up within weeks – certainly by October. Should a state go through the hassle of changing its data systems to accommodate the new payments, if it may not be able to do so before the money effectively runs out? Many states may not be able to implement this program, according to Georgetown University law professor David A. Super.

Likewise, the tax deferment doesn’t make the obligation go away. Will companies adjust their payroll calculations to temporarily stop collecting a tax that they’ll just have to collect later, under current law? And if they do make those changes, and employee income temporarily increases, will that be subject to income tax?

Mr. Trump has said that if reelected, he will forgive the deferred payroll tax. But he doesn’t have the power to do that – presidents can’t cut taxes on their own. Plus, it’s a ton of money, another trillion dollars or so, and it’s the primary funding mechanism for Social Security and Medicare, the government’s giant (and popular) senior support programs.

Many businesses may just throw up their hands and leave payroll withholdings as they are.

Are the actions unconstitutional? 

Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska has slammed Mr. Trump’s signings as “unconstitutional slop.” Indeed, the Constitution explicitly assigns taxing and spending powers to Congress, and Mr. Trump is trying to take some measure of that power for his own.

But the order and memos are so narrowly drawn that they may avoid constitutional issues. They draw on existing presidential powers as outlined in statutes such as the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, which allow chief executives to spend federal money on relief for disaster victims, according to University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel.

They’re not illegal so much as ineffective, according to Mr. Hemel.

President Barack Obama used an executive order in 2014 to order prosecutorial discretion in the case of the “Dreamers,” immigrants brought to America illegally as children. Republicans say that precedent is one of the things Mr. Trump is drawing on today.

The Democratic response to Mr. Trump’s measures has generally been to portray them as insufficient, not as executive branch overreach. The implication: Under a President Joe Biden, executive orders and memorandums might continue to play a role in getting around congressional inaction. 

About 20 years ago, Ernie Eads, who lives on Prince of Wales Island on the tip of the Alaska Panhandle, had a business idea. He emptied his bank account and bought, for $50,000, a sawmill in Pennsylvania that he disassembled, crated, and barged from Seattle to his home.

But before Mr. Eads had a chance to bolt the mill together, the U.S. Forest Service issued the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which severely limited construction of new roads on nearly 60 million acres of land in national forests across the United States – including half of the largest one, Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. 

Home to wolves, brown bears, flying squirrels, and endangered birds such as the marbled murrelet, the Tongass is the largest (mostly) intact temperate rainforest on Earth. It spans 17 million acres from Mount Armour, 8,000 feet above sea level, across ice fields, glaciers, fjords, wetlands, and forests of old growth spruce, hemlock, and cedar that, combined, are larger than Maryland. 

The so-called Roadless Rule, issued right before President Bill Clinton left office, doesn’t apply to the relatively small tracts of Native American land in Southeast Alaska. And timber companies inside the forest could still bulldoze short stretches that branch off existing roads. But, by and large, loggers could no longer take their skidders and loaders into the panhandle’s most profitable old-growth tracts.

With the rule in place, Mr. Eads couldn’t buy up enough timber to make it worth running his mill. “It pretty much wiped out any plans I had,” he says. Today, his investment lies unused in his yard, now a heap of rusting steel.

Late last fall, the Forest Service proposed exempting the Tongass from the Roadless Rule. According to reporting by the Washington Post, President Donald Trump personally requested the revision. More places might be next: Last July Utah asked for an exemption for its own Forest Service lands.

A final decision in Alaska could come in the next several months. If, as expected, the agency reverses the road-construction ban, some of the groves of giant conifers that have been protected by it will once more be at risk. Mr. Eads hopes the restrictions will end, but he says the change will come too late for him. “I got old,” he says. 

Daniel Grossman

Ernie Eads traded his savings for a sawmill just before the Roadless Rule made it hard to find big trees to cut into lumber. He never even bolted it together. The pieces (in the background) lie in rusting near his house.

Alaska’s Republican governor and all-Republican congressional delegation favor reversing the road ban, but public opinion in the state tilts against it, either by a large majority or a plurality, depending on whether you trust the opinion poll conducted by a Republican pollster or one commissioned by a national environmental group. The Forest Service received 144,000 comments – mostly opposed – to a draft published in 2018. But both proponents and opponents agree that new roads won’t revive Alaska’s timber industry.

Lying at the heart of the disagreement is Alaska’s dual identity as both an untouched wilderness and as a font of economic opportunity for those willing to brave it. At stake is millions of acres of Alaska’s natural heritage, immense trees that have stood for centuries, and an important carbon sink for the world's fossil fuel emissions. 

Boom and bust

Michael Kampnich, who lives on a head of land facing the Pacific Ocean in Craig, the island’s largest town, has spent most of his life on Prince of Wales, or POW, as locals call it. A New York state native, he drove up to Alaska in 1980 at the age of 21, where he landed a job felling timber.

Cutting timber, especially the larger trees, was a thrill, he says, recalling his years wielding chain saws with cutting bars as long as fishing rods along the fog-shrouded fjords of Southeast Alaska. This was in the 1980s, when the timber boom was in full swing. Mills sawed some of the wood into lumber for home construction and specialized uses such as piano soundboards where lengths of straight, tight grain is prized.

But much of the harvest was ground into chips and simmered in acid, producing an industrial feedstock that this one mill, Ketchikan Pulp, called Tongacell. Almost all of it was shipped to Japan, China, and other southeast Asian countries, where factories spun it into rayon. 

This mill, one of two such mills in the region, employed more than 1,000 workers, and supported hundreds more loggers, longshoremen, truckers, tug boat operators, and road builders. 

The company had a 50-year contract with the Forest Service for 8 billion board feet of wood, enough to build a boardwalk to the moon. “I went from making minimum wage,” Mr. Kampnich recalls, “to 200 to 250 dollars a day.”

But times changed, and so did Mr. Kampnich. Alaska pulp faced new overseas competition, rayon lost market share, and, mirroring battles to protect old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, environmental groups pushed through greater protection for old-growth trees. In 1981 and again in 1990, large swaths of the Tongass became designated wilderness areas, with logging prohibited. New rules reduced the size of clear cuts, halted cutting alongside streams, and outlawed “high grading,” cherry-picking the biggest, most lucrative trees.

Daniel Grossman

Michael Kampnich moved from the lower 48 to Alaska in 1980 and became a logger. Cutting huge trees was thrilling, he says. But now he says timber companies cut too much.

Mr. Kampnich retired from logging, and took up commercial fishing. He now says that loggers cut too much: “I’ve come to realize that we need to maintain some of these areas as unroaded in natural conditions.” The Nature Conservancy has hired him to promote its pro-environmental message on the island.

A 2013 paper in the journal Conservation Biology found that two-thirds of the big contiguous stands of the largest spruce, cedar, and hemlock in the Tongass have now been removed. Richard Carstensen, a naturalist at Discovery Southeast, a nature education center, says what’s left breaks his heart. “If people want to experience what it must have been like to walk half a day through a giant-tree forest, we can send them to a place where they walk for five minutes before they pop out the other side.” On POW, just 6.2% of the big-tree forests remain.

Would more roads bring the boom back? Dennis Watson, who lives near Mr. Kampnich, doubts that revising the Roadless Rule will increase the amount of timber cut. “I don’t think it’s going to go up. It’s not in the cards.” Mr. Watson was mayor of Craig for 26 years, until 2017. He has tried to reverse the Roadless Rule ever since it became law. But he’s aware that timber harvests had been sliding steadily for a decade before the Forest Service banned new roads.

Nathalie Dawson, head of the Audubon Society’s Alaska office and a Ph.D. biologist, says Tongass wood simply costs too much to be competitive, despite heavy subsidies from the Forest Service. The federal government props up logging Tongass wood in several ways, including funding maintenance of existing logging roads. It might pay for construction of new ones. Environmental rules have increased the oversight, and therefore the cost to taxpayers, of logging. But Alaska’s greatest problem is its uneconomical distance from the contiguous U.S. and international timber markets. The pulp mills had closed down years before the Roadless Rule became law. And, Dr. Dawson says, the best trees are gone. “Basically, they cut everything that was easy to get.” New timber has gotten more and more expensive to get.

Tessa Axelson, director of the Alaska Forestry Association, agrees with Dr. Dawson in one regard: that much of the timber currently offered by the Forest Service is too expensive to be profitable.

“We have been challenged to receive a predictable supply” of economically harvestable wood, she says. Opening up new areas to logging (with roads that the Forest Service might build at taxpayer expense) would alleviate the problem, she adds. “The primary beneficiaries are the communities of Southeast Alaska.”

Dr. Dawson doubts that releasing the industry from road-building rules will help the local economy much. Most Tongass logs are shipped directly to Asia with little processing. And the timber industry now has little potential to boost Southeast Alaska’s employment. The only sawmill with more than a handful of workers, Viking Lumber, a few miles outside Craig, employs only about 35 people. Roughly 300 people in Alaska work in forestry and wood processing, less than one-tenth of 1% of the state’s workforce.

A frontier mentality

So why did Alaska’s leading elected officials campaign to rescind the rule?

Stephen Haycox, an emeritus history professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage says that the state’s unusual political culture plays a big role. He says Alaskans spend more time on public and wild lands than most other Americans. But, “that doesn’t prevent them at all from supporting exploitation of the resource base.” Alaskans have earned their living by digging up and pumping up what’s below the ground, chopping down what’s on the surface, and scooping out what’s in the sea ever since the Klondike Gold Rush. (And, of course the state's indigenous people have lived off the land for much longer.) Alaska’s frigid temperatures and separation from the rest of the country make it noncompetitive for most growing and manufacturing as well as for timbering.

Professor Haycox, author of “Alaska: An American Colony,” says Alaskans have developed a powerful romantic association with the myth of the rugged individual: self-reliant and free of distant bureaucrats. It “plays very well in the Alaskan psyche.” Successful state-level politicians know how to harness this ideology, he says, for their own purposes. It’s “second nature for them to protest any action of federal government that inhibits any economic activity in Alaska.” Never mind the cold fact that Alaska is thoroughly dependent on federal subsidies and oil-company payments. 

Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, is the state’s senior senator. Her opposition to the Roadless Rule is “not only about timber,” she says in a phone interview. She says the rule hampers access to mineral resources and hydroelectric sites. The goal, she says, is to “make sure people can actually access the region.” 

Mr. Watson, the former Craig mayor, hopes that a new mine extracting rare earth metals, elements in demand for electronics and high performance magnets, will soon open at an inaccessible site on the island, the first such mine in the U.S. But he says red tape could slow approval of a road to the location, even though the Roadless Rule permits transportation corridors in support of such nonlogging activities. “We’d like to have things happen on this island that will allow us to survive,” he said. 

Eric Jorgensen, managing attorney of EarthJustice’s Alaska office and veteran of more than a dozen lawsuits countering challenges to the Roadless Rule, says Mr. Watson’s and Sen. Murkowski’s concern is “not based in reality.” He says that “even if red tape were a problem, that would not be a rationale for gutting the rule,” as the Forest Service could solve that issue without allowing new logging roads.

In an old-growth forest 20 miles northwest of Craig, Elsa Sebastian, a commercial fisherman who grew up on POW, points out a new clear-cut. The trunks had been dragged away, and the waist-high stumps were like empty pedestals after the ransacking of an ancient temple.

Downhill, through carpets of moss, liverworts, and ferns toward the Thorne River, a thin strip of uncut forest, required by state law, was left to protect the stream. Pink salmon flopped frantically in shallow pools. They’d spawn soon. Ms. Sebastian leaned against the base of a hemlock nearly as wide as her outstretched arms and probably half as high as the 22-story Conoco-Phillips building in Anchorage. 

Rescinding the Roadless Rule might not increase the wood logged. But it will threaten surviving ancients like this and threaten rare animals that live among them. “That tree was standing before the United States was the United States,” she said, gazing into its crown. “Just being in the presence of such a being puts our lifetimes into perspective.”

AP

Former Vice President Joe Biden and then-candidate Sen. Kamala Harris shake hands after a Sept. 12, 2019 primary debate. On Tuesday, Mr. Biden selected Senator Harris as his running mate.

Half a century after Americans landed men on the moon, a Black woman is the nominee for vice president, thus standing on the threshold of becoming president. As a measure of human progress, the first is to physics while the second is to social equality. Yet each is alike in the distance traveled and the obstacles overcome.

Joe Biden vowed to name a woman as his running mate even before he emerged as the Democratic Party’s primary winner from the most diverse field of presidential candidates – diverse in gender, ethnicity, generation, sexual orientation, and ideology. He had no shortage of prospects.

In Kamala Harris he has chosen a governing partner with roots in social justice. Ms. Harris was raised in Oakland, California, by immigrant parents. Her father emigrated from Jamaica to study economics. Her mother arrived from India and became a medical scientist. They raised their daughters amid the civil rights movement in the Bay Area. Ms. Harris became the district attorney of San Francisco and then attorney general of California before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016. Her selection reflects Mr. Biden’s promise to reduce incarceration and reform policing in response to the summer’s social justice protest movement.

As an emblem of a Democratic establishment that is largely male, white, and older, Mr. Biden may be a transitional agent of change. He has billed himself as the bridge to a more inclusive era of politics that has already arrived in the party’s rank and file. The current Congress marks the fifth time in a row that the House and Senate became more diverse following an election. Women make up nearly a quarter of the membership in each chamber, the highest percentage in history. The speaker of the House is a woman. Roughly 13% of lawmakers are immigrants or children of immigrants.

When Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman to be added to the ticket of a major political party in 1984, her candidacy was considered a novelty. Since then the political landscape has been transformed. Nearly half of all the women who have ever served in the House were elected since 1998. Across the Capitol’s Rotunda, 29 of the 56 women who have served in the Senate were elected in 2000 or later. Beyond Washington, 29% of all state legislators are women.

The Republican Party added a woman, Sarah Palin, to its ticket in 2008. Eight years later, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to lead her party into an election. Although she lost, she shattered one glass ceiling. Six women sought the party’s nomination this year. There is also greater gender, ethnic, and income diversity unfolding in congressional and state legislative races.

Demographic milestones are one measure of progress to the extent that they reflect a broadening consent about equality in citizenship. Over the decades, from Emancipation to the current social justice movement, representative democracy has gradually come to represent a fuller range of the governed. The acceptance of different groups also forces deeper insight into each person’s qualities of thought, regardless of human circumstances. Governing, after all, requires universal application of laws and principles.

Through the troubled history of the United States, Black women have borne in quiet dignity and despair a unique weight, whether from sexual violence, social injustice, or economic marginalization. Now that history enters a new chapter with a Black woman as the Democratic candidate for vice president. Whether her party’s ticket wins or loses, the choice of Ms. Harris sends a signal – especially to Black girls – that Americans have gained greater capacity to recognize each individual’s inherent worth.