Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will reportedly resign as the junior senator from California on Monday, only four years after joining the U.S. Senate for the first time and a mere two days before she assumes office as President-elect Joe Biden’s vice president.
According to The Associated Press, aides to Harris have confirmed her imminent departure from the California Senate delegation, and Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who has already hand-picked a long-time ally as her successor, has also been informed. Harris joined the Senate back in 2017, where she served alongside long-time California senior Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA).
Harris will not be giving a farewell speech to the Senate, as other senators have done in the past, because the Senate is not currently in session. In addition to serving as the first female vice president, Harris will be joining the long list of other U.S. senators who resigned to become vice president, including Biden back in 2009, when he resigned after serving as the senator from Delaware since 1973.
Senator-designate Alex Padilla, who will soon resign as the California Secretary of State, will soon be traveling to Washington, D.C., where he will reportedly take the oath of office on Wednesday as the junior senator from California, according to CNN.
Padilla is just one of several California elected officials who will be elevated to higher office as a result of the Biden presidency.
Back in December, Biden picked California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. The HHS department head occupies a relatively low position in the presidential line of succession, but the department head has received more public attention in the last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Should Becerra be confirmed, Newsom would have the opportunity to fill the attorney general seat as well as the secretary of state seat — for which he has already picked Assemblymember Shirley Weber, a former long-time Africana studies professor.
That said, Becerra may have a difficult time getting confirmed in the Senate. As The Daily Wire previously noted:
In 2003, he voted against a bill sponsored by former Senator Rick Santorum(R-PA) which sought to ban partial-birth abortion except in cases where the mother’s life was at risk. More recently, he headed a coalition in April to fight the Mississippi legislature after they passed a bill prohibiting abortion after the fifteenth week of pregnancy. Several of his anti-Trump suits also sought to reverse religious protections to employers and doctors in providing brith control and abortion.
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When asked in 2017 whether he would support a socialized plan similar to those proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), he responded with a resounding yes. “Oh, absolutely. I’ve been a supporter of Medicare for all of the 24 years I was in Congress.” When pressed about these comments, an insider told Politico that the Biden team is confident Becerra will support Biden’s pledge to create a public insurance option that will compete with private plans.