An influential voice and a decisive vote
washington » Vice President Kamala Harris represented the march of history when she was sworn in Wednesday by Supreme
Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. As a Californian of Jamaican and Indian descent, she is the first woman and the first woman of color to hold the nation’s second-highest office.
It was a landmark moment. But just hours later, Harris was on the job, reto the U.S. Capitol to execute her constitutional role as president of the Senate and swear in three new Democratic senators: Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the two Democrats elected in a Georgia special election this month, and Alex Padilla, her own successor to the California seat she resigned Monday.
Presiding in the Senate shortly before 5 p.m., Harris was visibly amused as she announced that she would swear in Padilla “to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California.”
At that, she let loose a hearty laugh. “Yes, that was very weird!” she added.
The light moment belied the serious stakes at play with the swearing in of three new Democrats. It also served notice of how important the Senate will be to the start of Harris’ tenure as vice president in the Biden administration.
With the Senate divided 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, and President Joe Biden hoping to pass ambitious legislation on the coronavirus, the economy, climate change and other policy matters, Harris — who as vice president will break any tiebreaking votes — may find herself returning often to the Capitol.
“There’s definitely going to be a demand, I think, in a 50-50 Senate, like I’ve never seen in the Senate before,” said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.
“For the Biden-harris agenda, she will be in Congress very, very often or reaching out to senators very often to try to push that agenda through,” Booker said.
An aide to Harris said that she had already begun reaching out to other senators about White House nominations, including that of retired Gen. Lloyd Austin III to be secretary of defense. But Harris, 56, is sure to be far more than a 51st Democratic senator to Biden. She will bring to her history-making role at the White House an array of skills that Biden will draw on, including the prosecutorial chops that she displayed in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, her personal energy that balances Biden’s lowkey approach and the voice she will offer to women and people of color.
“She’ll bring a justice lens, a racial justice lens, racial equity, to everything and every policy and every decision that’s going to be made,” said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-calif., a longtime ally of Harris. “That’s so important, to have a Black woman, a South Asian woman’s perspective, on the big issues that this administration has to tackle.”
Current and former aides to both Biden and Harris say that while dealturning ing with the Senate will be important to her job, she has not been assigned a specific issue portfolio, at least at the outset, and will instead serve as a governing partner to Biden on all of his top priorities. If fulfilled, that mandate could make her among the most influential vice presidents in history.
In one sign of how much she may be involved in legislative campaigns, Harris has been in touch with mayors around the country to preview Biden’s coronavirus relief package, the Harris aide said.
From the moment that Harris was chosen as Biden’s running mate, Republicans sought to paint her as a radical who would co-opt the more centrist Biden agenda and push any administration far to the left, often relying on sexist personal attacks in the process. Yet while Harris and Biden had sharp disagreements on a number of issues during the primary, as his running mate she made a point at every turn to demonstrate that she not only embraced his agenda but also had studied his proposals in detail and was fully on board as his partner.
On Wednesday, she reveled in the moment as she appeared outside the Capitol for her inauguration.
“So proud of you,” former President Barack Obama told her as they fistbumped shortly before her swearing-in. Minutes later, Harris, clad in a purple coat, barely suppressed a smile as she finished taking her oath from Sotomayor, her hand on a Bible once belonging to Thurgood Marshall, the former Supreme Court justice.
After the inaugural ceremony, Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, escorted her predecessor, Mike Pence, and his wife, Karen Pence, down the Capitol steps for Pence’s departure. The couples stopped midway for a friendly chat punctuated by laughter.
In her next role, though, Harris may face inherent challenges, including finding her place in a West Wing stocked with veterans of the Obama White House who have known and worked with one another for years and advising a president with deeply fixed ideas of how Washington operates. And given speculation that the 78year-old Biden may not seek a second term in office, Harris, who mounted her own unsuccessful 2020 White House bid, is sure to face scrutiny about her electoral future much earlier than did her predecessors.