WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) – Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will resign her Senate seat Monday, two days before she and Elected President Joe Biden are inaugurated.
California Democrat aides confirmed the timing, saying Gavin Newsom’s government was aware of her decision and paved the way for him to appoint fellow Democrat Alex Padilla, now California’s Secretary of State, for the past two years. of Harris’ term of office.
Padilla will be the first Latino senator from California, where about 40% of the population is Spanish. Newsom announced his choice in December after intensive lobbying for the rare holiday senate in the country with the largest population.
Harris will not say goodbye to the Senate’s floor speech. The Senate will not meet again on Tuesday, the eve of Inauguration Day.
Padilla’s arrival, and Harris also becoming chair of the Senate when she was sworn in as vice president, is part of the forthcoming majority of the Senate. But the party still needs the elected sens. — Jon Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia to be certified as winners in their January 5 election and then sworn in.
Harris will be the first black woman and first woman of South Asian descent to serve as vice president, but her departure from the Senate will leave the room without a black woman. Harris was only the second black women’s senator to win her California election 17 years after Democrat Carol Moseley Braun completed a single term representing Illinois.
Among many potential successors to Harris, Newsom has passed on at least two prominent black women, U.S. representatives, Karen Bass and Barbara Lee. Bass was also one of Biden’s finalists for running mate.
Democrats were in the minority during Harris’ four years on Capitol Hill. Her biggest point was perhaps as a fierce questioner of judicial nominees and other witnesses as a member of the Senate judiciary.
Harris was considered a future presidential candidate almost immediately when she joined the Senate in 2017. She announced her bid in the White House in January 2019, but dropped out the following December after a sluggish campaign and before the ballots in Iowa’s first in the nation caucuses. Biden, herself a former senator, invited her in August to join the national ticket.
The victories by Ossoff and Warnock in Georgia secured a 50-50 Senate, which positioned Harris as the casting vote for Democratic rule. But Ossoff and Warnock cannot join the chamber until Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger confirms the final votes. Raffensperger, a Republican, said he could act as soon as Tuesday and possibly allow Padilla, Ossoff and Warnock to pull the Senate together as early as the afternoon session.
But Republicans will maintain a narrow majority until all three take office and Harris takes the chair.
Harris’ early departure from the Senate has several precedents.
Biden was the last sitting senator elected vice president. He resigned his post in Delaware on January 15, 2009, five days before he and Barack Obama were inaugurated. Obama, a senator at the time of his election, resigned his seat in Illinois two months before Biden.