Kamala Harris takes questions at CNN town hall

Our live coverage of CNN's town hall with Kamala Harris has ended. Scroll through the posts below to see how it unfolded or visit CNN Politics.

California Sen. Kamala Harris stayed put for a while after CNN's town hall wrapped up at Drake University.

After asking CNN's Jake Tapper if she could go out into the audience, Harris went down and shook hands with Iowa voters who swarmed to the front of the stage. She chatted with them and exchanged some laughs.

She later went to a watch party on campus and held mini town hall with students, CNN's Maeve Reston reported.

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Speaking at tonight's town hall, Kamala Harris said the first thing she would do as president is pass a massive tax cut for middle class families.

It was the second time Harris referred to her tax credit proposal, tilted LIFT the Middle Class Act, or Livable Incomes for Families Today.

Earlier in CNN’s event, Harris said that she was proposing “one of the most significant tax cuts for middle class families in generations,” noting there are babies in America who are on the verge of starving and families who can’t pay their bills.

Her legislation would provide a refundable tax credit of $6,000 for married couples earning up to $60,000 a year. Single filers making up to $30,000 and single parents earning up to $80,000 would get a credit of $3,000. The credit would then start to phase out. Couples and single parents with earnings of more than $100,000 and single filers making more than $50,000 would no longer be eligible.

Unlike a typical tax credit, though, the bill would also allow taxpayers to receive the benefit -- up to $500 -- on a monthly basis.

One thing to note: This tax gift would be worth $3 trillion over 10 years, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. But her suggested ways to pay for this benefit would not cover the bill, experts said.

At the same time, she jumped on the progressive Democratic bandwagon of blasting the top 1%, which her potential future opponent Sen. Elizabeth Warren has championed.

“People at the top 1% -- people who are making $10 million a year, who have $50 million a year, they need to pay more taxes,” she said to extended applause.

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During tonight's town hall, Jill Zwagerman, a civil attorney from Iowa, thanked Sen. Kamala Harris for her tough questions during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's hearings in September.

Zwagerman also brought up the #metoo movement and how some men feel attacked by the movement. She then asked Harris how she planned to unite men and women who are so polarized.

Here's how Harris responded:

During the hearing last fall, Harris pressed Kavanaugh on whether he had discussed special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation with anyone and the Charlottesville violence.

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A few months ago, almost no one had heard of it.

But on Monday night, Kamala Harris endorsed a “Green New Deal” -- an ambitious and increasingly popular plan for combating climate change while making massive public investments into the clean energy economy.

About an hour before Harris said those words, President Trump, commenting on the freezing weather sweeping across the Midwest, tweeted: “What the hell is going on with Global Wa(r)ming? Please come back fast, we need you!”

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and progressive groups led by the Sunrise Movement are agitating for the comprehensive reform package, one that package a swift move toward 100% renewable energy with economic reforms, including a jobs guarantee and heavy taxpayer spending -- perhaps in the hundreds of billions of dollars -- on low or no-carbon infrastructure, like light rail for commuters.

But movement leaders argue that cuts to fossil fuel industry subsidies and military spending, in addition to the stimulative effects of the new public spending, would offset any cost.

“We have policymakers who are in the pockets of big oil and big coal,” Harris said on Monday, and they “don’t fully appreciate the fact that we are looking at something that is presenting an existential threat to our country and listen, all children should be able to breathe clean air and drink clean water.”

Responding to Harris’ comments, Sunrise founder Varshini Prakash credited activist pressure for shifting the political landscape.

“Yesterday dozens of Sunrise members in Oakland dropped a banner over the 20,000 person crowd of Kamala Harris’ Presidential launch rally asking her to stand with our generation by backing a Green New Deal Today, she backed a Green New Deal,” Prakash said. “We’ll continue to push the Senator to make sure that the Green New Deal, for her, is more than just a buzzword, because for our generation a Green New Deal is the difference between life or death.”

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Sen. Kamala Harris got up from her chair at CNN's town hall Monday evening to answer a question from a DACA recipient on what solutions she sees for their future, which has been caught in a fierce debate over the President's signature border wall.

For context: Harris has been a fierce defender of the Obama-era program, which shields undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children from deportation and allows them to work legally in the US. She’s held roundtables with the program’s beneficiaries, hosted press conferences, and headlined rallies.

One of the concerns she’s raised over time is the sharing of recipient's information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security. In late 2017, Harris pressed Nielsen on whether she would protect DACA recipients and commit to not sharing information for enforcement purposes. Harris reiterated those concerns Monday night.

The Trump administration tried to end DACA in September 2017, but was met with a slew of legal challenges. Federal judges have kept the program, which has nearly 700,000 active participants, intact.

But their protections have come into play more than once in negotiations over border wall funding. Most recently, the administration put forth a proposal that would extend protections for recipients in exchange for the border wall.

Harris criticized that process.

Asked by Jake Tapper if she would support a border wall, Harris answered, “I’m not going to vote for a wall under any circumstances.” She added, however, that she supports border security.

Watch: Harris says Trump is playing 'political games' with DACA recipients

Asked directly how she would manage America’s health care system, Kamala Harris fully embraced “Medicare for all” single payer health insurance, saying it’s something she feels “very strongly” about.

“We need to have Medicare for all,” Harris told a questioner in the audience who also asked if she would be willing to cut private insurers out of the mix.

Harris framed it as a moral question, saying:

The current system, where insurers are more focused on their bottom lines, is “inhumane,” she said.

Harris noted that when her mother was fortunate to have Medicare when she dying of cancer a decade ago. Last month, the candidate wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times saying she will fight for a better health care system in her mother’s name.

Pressed by CNN's Jake Tapper on the fate of for-profit insurers, Harris, who co-sponsored Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for all” bill, didn’t hedge.

“Let’s eliminate all of that,” she said of all the paperwork and approval processes that insurers require. “Let’s move on.”

The question -- and answer -- are important to “Medicare for all” supporters on the left, who despite being pleased at the policy’s growing popularity, worry that it could be watered down in a crowded primary field.

"There's going to be a question if any of those (other potential presidential candidates) take power: Do they actually want to create a single-payer program or is it just a messaging strategy to win people over with big ideas?," Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for the progressive group Justice Democrats, told CNN last year. "Do they support the end of private health insurance in the United States of America. Because that is what the bill is proposing to do. We're going to get way more into the specifics than we did in 2016."

Sen. Kamala Harris defended her criminal justice record during CNN’s town hall on Monday, refuting some liberal criticism of her record by arguing that she has “been consistent my whole career.”

The answer, which was succinct and direct, showed that Harris is not only aware of the criticism of her time as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California, but is prepared to take it on.

“I’ve been consistent my whole career,” she said response to a question that asked her to address her “contradictory past.”

She added: “I have also worked my whole career to reform the criminal justice system, understanding, to your point, that it is deeply flawed.”

The liberal pushback to Harris’ record on crime was epitomized by a recent op-ed by Lara Bazelon, former director for the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles.

“In her career, Ms. Harris did not barter or trade to get the support of more conservative law-and-order types; she gave it all away,” Bazelon wrote.

Harris listed a litany of actions she took at attorney general, including:

Harris also outlined how she is “personally opposed to the death penalty,” adding “that is not going to change.” In addition to calling it a “flawed system,” Harris said it is “cheaper to let people spend their life and end their life in jail.” She did not mention that she defended California’s death penalty in court.

Harris went on to say there is still a lot of work to do on criminal justice, namely addressing mass incarceration, bail reform and the disproportionate application of the crime, but stands by what she has done.

But in a nod to some decisions she made in the past to punish criminals, Harris said that those changes need to be balanced with the need to impose penalties on those who commit crimes.

“We all realize it is a deeply flawed system, but we also want to make sure that when a woman is raped, a child is molested, one human being is killed by another human being, there is going to be consequence, and serious consequence, for those crimes,” she said.

Pressed by CNN’s Jake Tapper on some of the pushback to her record, Harris said she would compare her record to any other elected prosecutor in the country and knows there are some people she can’t win over.

“I will also say that there is so much more work to do,” she said. “And do I wish I could have done more? Absolutely, I do wish I could have done more.”

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Kamala Harris, answering a woman who wondered how she will avoid getting caught up in President Donald Trump's "crazy," responded:

Watch below: