WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) – Vice President-elect Kamala Harris she will resign her seat in the Senate on Monday, two days before she and President-elect Joe Biden are sworn in.
California Democrat aides confirmed the moment and said Gov. Gavin Newsom was aware of his decision, paving the way for him to appoint his Democrat Alex Padilla, now California’s secretary of state, to meet the two. last years of Harris’ tenure.
Padilla will be the first Latin senator in California, where about 40% of residents are Hispanic. Newsom announced his election in December, after intense pressure on the rare vacancy in the Senate of the nation’s most populous state.
Harris will not give a farewell speech to the Senate. The Senate is not scheduled to meet again until Tuesday, the eve of the opening day.
Padilla’s arrival, along with Harris, becoming Senate president when she serves as vice president, is part of the Democrats ’next Senate majority. But the party still needs Elected Sir Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia to get certified winners in their Jan. 5 election and then be invested.
Harris will be the first black woman and the first of South Asian descent to be vice president, but her exit in the Senate leaves the chamber list without a black woman. Harris was only the second black senator, winning her election in California 17 years after Democrat Carol Moseley Braun ended a single term representing Illinois.
Among many of Harris’ possible successors, Newsom outnumbered at least two prominent black women, U.S. Representatives Karen Bass and Barbara Lee. Bass was also one of Biden’s finalists as a career partner.
Democrats were in the minority during Harris’ four years on Capitol Hill. Perhaps his most important mark came as a fierce interrogation 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 entering the Senate in 2017. He announced his candidacy for the White House in January 2019, but left the following December after a sparse campaign and before that the votes be cast in the first place of the Iowa caucus nations. Biden, himself a former senator, invited her to join the national ticket in August.
Osoff and Warnock’s victories in Georgia secured a 50-50 Senate, positioning Harris as the tiebreaker 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 president’s chair.
Harris ’early departure from the Senate has multiple precedents.
Biden was the last senator to be elected vice president. He resigned in Delaware on January 15, 2009, five days before he and Barack Obama were sworn in. Obama, a senator at the time of his election, had resigned his seat in Illinois two months before Biden.