Kamala 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
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris speaks in Wilmington, Del., on Saturday, Jan. 16, 2021, as President-elect Joe Biden looks on. Harris will have the power to break ties in an evenly divided Senate; Image: Amr Alfiky/The New York Times
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, returning to 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.
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