With Democrats winning two Georgia Senate runoffs, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will have a new role: the tie-breaking vote in the Senate.
“Depending on how it plays out, she will cast tie-breaking votes on some of the most important pieces of legislation of the early Biden administration,” said Jim Manley, a former top aide to onetime Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat. “But it’s not going to happen all the time.”
The legislative filibuster effectively sets a 60-vote threshold to most controversial legislation, so Harris won’t be pressed into service there. An exception is a Senate rule that Republicans used in 2017, when the GOP controlled both chambers in Congress, to enact tax cuts.
Harris’s most important vote “may be on the so-called reconciliation bills that will be used to pass some of [President-elect Joe Biden’s] tax and spending proposals,” said Manley.
Among the first orders of business will be a multitrillion-dollar economic package, with increased direct payments to taxpayers, a central promise of Biden’s agenda that he committed to while campaigning this month in Georgia.
If no Republicans come on board, Democrats can still pass the legislation with just a simple majority by using the budget reconciliation process, but the narrow margin means they need every lawmaker in their party on board.
One Senate Democrat, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, has already signaled reservations to another round of stimulus checks, highlighting the potential challenges ahead for Harris and Biden, even as the party holds both chambers of Congress.
Other Senate centrists, such as Republicans Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, could see their stock rise as they are sought to break a bill’s vote threshold. Under the last 50-50 Senate in 2001, a dozen Democrats helped pass the Bush tax cuts.
Under a slim majority, any senator working with his or her colleagues could be an effective force for change, Manley said. “The question is whether they’re going to have the chance, given how hyperpartisan the Senate’s become,” he added.
Democrats will also need to find consensus between centrists and the party’s left wing.
“Vice president is a tough job in the best of circumstances, and getting tangled up in Senate politics is going to make it harder for her to carve out on her own,” said Mike McKenna, a veteran of past Republican administrations and a former deputy legislative affairs director in the Trump White House.
At any moment, somebody could wind up on the floor and make life difficult, meaning that Harris “is going to have to spend a lot of time working the senate and sitting in the chair,” he said. “It’s going to staple her to the Senate in a way I’m sure she’d rather not be.”
Cleavages inside the Democratic Party caucus grew tense during the presidential primary as lawmakers such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders sought to push a leftward agenda. With Biden set to assume office, the fights may soon resume again.
“Is Biden going to cough up something like a climate and infrastructure package? Sure he is,” McKenna said. “Is it going to be big? At first. And then, it’s going to get whittled down and whittled down and whittled down.”
“When there is a need to be up there to be a tiebreaking vote, of course she will be there. But the administration wants to work with the Senate” to limit this, a Harris adviser told the Los Angeles Times.
An evenly split Senate has only happened thrice before (1881, 1953, and when George W. Bush took office in 2001), and the arrangement may not last long.
The last time the Senate split like this, the two parties worked out an agreement to share power.
Vice President Dick Cheney occupied Harris’s soon-to-be role, but the setup was in place less than six months before Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont switched parties to become an independent and caucus with the Democrats.
If the numbers change, Harris’s duties in her constitutional role as the president of the Senate chamber would more resemble her immediate predecessors.
Vice President Mike Pence has broken 13 ties, mostly on nominations, while President-elect Joe Biden as vice president broke none.
“Don’t get me wrong, it is going to look great, but I don’t think she’s ever going to wind up in a spot where she’s going to have some heroic moment,” McKenna said.
Still, a benefit for the Biden-Harris agenda is that their Georgia wins mean Biden won’t have to govern principally by regulatory or executive action.
The Biden-Harris Transition did not return a request for comment.
