Vice President Harris takes an oath that makes history
Washington — Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president of the United States on Wednesday, stepping into history as the highest-ranking female politician in American history.
As the world watched and worried and hoped, Harris raised her right hand, face steeled as it was through so many hearings and debates that it became her signature stare.
Then, as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor read “so help me God,” the stoicism broke.
“So help me God,” Harris repeated, overcome with a smile as her sister, Maya, broke into tears behind her. She hugged her husband. She found Joe Biden waiting, shaking his fists
in triumph. Then she walked back to her seat and into history.
The moment reflected a historic rise at a time of historic crises. Harris, the 56-year-old daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, became the first Black person and the first person of South Asian descent to hold an office that has been previously occupied solely by white men. She was sworn in by Sotomayor, the first Latina to serve on the nation’s highest court, a calculated choice from a former senator from California who has highlighted women of color during her career.
The weight of the history Harris made — and what it took for her to make it — were ever-present Wednesday.
From the moment Harris stepped out of her motorcade, she and her husband, Doug Emhoff, were escorted by Eugene Goodman, the Black Capitol police officer who held off a mostly White mob of rioters during the attempted siege of the complex this month. Goodman also escorted her to the balcony where she took the oath.
She stepped out to a gathered crowd that included allies such as Hillary Clinton, who nearly broke the glass ceiling for women in the nation’s highest offices four years sooner, and recent adversaries, including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the subject of one of her mosttalked-about interrogations on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
As she walked into the ceremony, she stooped to kiss her grandniece. She bumped fists with Barack Obama, the first Black man to serve as president. She shared a few words with Mike Pence, her predecessor, who called Harris to congratulate her earlier this week, even as President Donald Trump refused to do so.
She passed women wearing pearls like her, including Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., who wore pearls that used to belong to late congresswoman Shirley Chisholm — a nod to the first Black woman to run for president. The pearls were also a nod to Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. When Harris ran for president last year, she chose her logo and colors based on the ones Chisholm used a half-century ago.
Harris, clad in an outfit of purple by Black designer Christopher John Rogers, took the oath of office with her hand on two Bibles. One belonged to civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice and a fellow Howard University graduate whom Harris, a former prosecutor, saw as a hero. The second belonged to Regina Shelton, a neighbor who was a second mother to Harris and her sister. Harris took her Senate oath on Shelton’s Bible in January 2017. Biden administered that oath.
Earlier in the day, Harris and Emhoff joined the Bidens, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and others at St. Matthew of the Apostle church for a prayer service. They joined the Bidens in a motorcade to the Capitol, where Harris was sworn in shortly before the new president.
“Don’t tell me things can’t change,” Biden said in his address, nodding to Harris’s inauguration.
Harris’s term was historic from the moment she finished the oath, but she has the potential to be one of the most consequential vice presidents in American history. Democrats and Republicans each hold 50 seats in the U.S. Senate and, as the president of the Senate, Harris holds the tiebreaking vote. The Democratic lean means the Biden-Harris administration has a clearer path to enacting legislative priorities, including an expansion of federal health-care subsidies, a comprehensive immigration overhaul and a tax increase on the wealthy.
One of Harris’s first official acts was to show Pence and his wife, Karen, to the motorcade that would carry them away from the Capitol and signal the transfer of power to the Biden administration. Normally, the new president walks the former president into retirement. But because former president Donald Trump did not attend the inauguration, it was Harris and her husband who walked the Pences down the steps.
Later in the afternoon, Harris walked up the steps to her office in the Executive Office building. She was escorted there by the Howard University marching band, surrounded by her family. A CNN reporter yelled to her, asking what her first job as vice president would be.
“Walk in to work,” she said, and indeed the work began shortly thereafter when Harris swore in three new Democratic senators: Alex Padilla, her replacement as senator from California and the first Latino to hold the position; and new senators from Georgia, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, whose victories in a pair of Jan. 5 runoffs knotted the chamber. At 33, Ossoff became the youngest senator sworn in since Biden, who was 30 when he first took office in 1973.
When she entered the chamber, Harris’s former Senate colleagues stood and applauded. When, in accordance with protocol, Harris read her own name as the senator that Padilla would replace, Harris laughed out loud.
“That was very weird,” she said, before asking the new senators to raise their right hands. Soon, she sat in the chair reserved for the president of the Senate, the first woman to occupy that seat, too.