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WILMINGTON, Del. – Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will resign her Senate seat on Monday (January 18), two days before she and President-elect Joe Biden are inaugurated.
Advisers to the California Democrat confirmed the timing and said Gov. Gavin Newsom was aware of his decision, paving the way for him to appoint fellow Democrat Alex Padilla, now California’s secretary of state, to serve both. last years of Harris’s tenure.
Padilla will be the first Latino senator from California, where about 40 percent of residents are Hispanic. Newsom announced his election in December, following intense lobbying for the rare vacancy in the Senate of the nation’s most populous state.
Harris will not give a farewell speech in the Senate. The Senate is not scheduled to meet again until Tuesday, Inauguration Day, two weeks after supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol as lawmakers rallied to affirm Biden’s election victory.
That siege, Harris said in an interview broadcast Sunday, “was seismic. It was a turning point. You know, sometimes we think that a turning point is bringing something that is positive. No. It was in many ways a reckoning. It was an exhibition of the vulnerability of our democracy ”.
Padilla’s arrival, along with Harris becoming the president of the Senate when she is sworn in as vice president, is part of the next majority of Democrats in the Senate. But the party still needs Georgia Senators-elect Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to be certified as victors in the Jan. 5 election and then sworn in.
Harris will be the first black woman and the first woman of South Asian descent to serve as vice president, but her departure from the Senate leaves the House list without a black woman. Harris was just the second black female senator, winning her California election 17 years after Democrat Carol Moseley Braun finished a single term representing Illinois.
Among Harris’s many potential successors, Newsom overlooked at least two prominent black women, US Representatives Karen Bass and Barbara Lee. Bass was also one of Biden’s finalists as a running mate.
Democrats were in the minority during Harris’s four years on Capitol Hill. Perhaps her biggest mark came as a fierce questioner of judicial candidates and other witnesses as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Harris was seen as a future presidential candidate almost immediately after joining the Senate in 2017. She announced her candidacy for the White House in January 2019 but withdrew the following December after a lackluster campaign and before ballots were cast in the first in the nation’s caucus. Biden, himself a former senator, invited her to join the national list in August.
Ossoff and Warnock’s victories in Georgia secured a 50-50 Senate, positioning Harris as the swing vote for Democratic control. But Ossoff and Warnock cannot join the chamber until Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger certifies the final vote count. Raffensperger, a Republican, has said he could act as early as Tuesday, possibly allowing Padilla, Ossoff and Warnock to join the Senate together as early as that afternoon’s session.
But Republicans will hold a narrow majority until all three take office and Harris sits in the presiding officer’s chair.
Harris’s early departure from the Senate has multiple precedents.
Biden was the last sitting senator to be elected vice president. He resigned from his post in Delaware on January 15, 2009, five days before he and Barack Obama took office. Obama, a senator at the time of his election, had resigned his seat in Illinois two months before Biden.
Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, have enjoyed conversations and debates about how Emhoff should be approached when Harris takes office.
During their joint interview with “CBS Sunday Morning”, Harris joked that some of Emhoff’s friends suggested that he might be nicknamed the “first guy.” Emhoff added that there were other ideas that “I cannot repeat on national television.”
The vice presidents’ wives, all of them wives before Emhoff, have generally been called the “second lady”, a nod to the “first lady” as the president’s wife.
Joking aside, Emhoff told CBS’s Jane Pauley that he would be the first “second gentleman” in American history.
