Kamala Harris has resigned her seat in the USA Senate in preparation for changing into the primary feminine vp in two days.
“Serving as your senator has been an honor,” Harris wrote in an open letter to Californians on Monday.
“And this isn’t goodbye. As we speak, as I resign from the Senate, I’m making ready to take an oath that might have me preside over it,” Harris mentioned in an op-ed printed within the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.
As vp, Harris will present the tie-breaking vote in a Senate that might be equally divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans.
The vice presidency is the one constitutional workplace within the US authorities that “belongs to each the manager department and the legislative department”, former Vice President Walter Mondale as soon as mentioned in a 2002 speech.
Harris’s distinctive function will make Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer the bulk chief of the Senate and provides Democrats management over the Senate’s agenda for the primary time in six years.
“Thus, as I depart the USA Senate, this isn’t goodbye. That is whats up,” Harris wrote.
Harris is being changed by Alex Padilla, the secretary of state of California who was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom. Padilla would be the first Latino senator from California.
Harris was first elected to the Senate when Donald Trump gained the presidency in 2016. In reviewing her accomplishments over the previous 4 years, Harris took observe of the turmoil the US skilled underneath Trump and expressed hope for a greater future.
“The previous 4 years have examined as a nation,” Harris mentioned, citing the Russian hack of the US election in 2016, Trump’s household separation coverage on the southwest border, the US backtracking on local weather change, the California wildfires, the Black Lives Matter protests of racial injustice and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This month, we witnessed one thing I assumed I might by no means see in the USA: A mob breached the US Capitol, making an attempt to thwart the certification of the 2020 election outcomes,” she mentioned.
“These haven’t been simple occasions by any stretch.”
Harris took observe of a number of benchmarks of change and progress together with the elections in Georgia of two Democratic candidates for Senate, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
Warnock is just the eleventh Black individual to be elected to the Senate in US historical past and Ossoff is the primary Jewish senator elected from the South since 1879.
“Change is feasible. For that, I’m grateful and able to get to work,” Harris mentioned.
“Thus, as I depart the USA Senate, this isn’t goodbye. That is whats up.”
Harris might be sworn in at Wednesday’s inauguration ceremony by Supreme Courtroom Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the primary Latina justice of the excessive court docket, in response to a report by ABC Information.
Marking the historic second, Harris will use a Bible for the swearing-in that belonged to the late civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall who was the primary Black individual to develop into a Supreme Courtroom Justice.
“The truth that Kamala Harris is a Black girl, is a girl of Indian ancestry, is a girl, routinely makes her totally different from each different vp this nation has ever seen,” Leah Daughtry, a former chief of employees on the Democratic Nationwide Committee, informed The Related Press information company.