Before taking her oath of office, Vice President Kamala Harris began working to persuade senators to approve key White House nominations, a priority for the new administration as it confronts dual health and economic crises and takes power with no confirmed Cabinet members.
Five nominees faced Senate panels Tuesday, including President Biden’s picks to lead the Treasury Department, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Department of Homeland Security, State Department, and Pentagon. His choice for transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, is scheduled for Thursday.
Among the nominees Harris is helping shepherd through the confirmation process is Biden’s pick for secretary of defense, retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, an aide confirmed on Wednesday to the Washington Examiner.
Austin, who served as head of U.S. Central Command and commander of U.S. troops in Iraq before his 2016 retirement, would be the country’s first black defense secretary. First, he must clear an additional hurdle by scoring a congressional waiver allowing him to bypass a rule that defense chiefs must be out of the military for at least seven years.
Both Democrats and Republicans have expressed concern over such waivers, with some grudgingly voting to approve one for then-President Donald Trump’s nominee Jim Mattis in 2017, vowing never again. A House vote could come Thursday.
Another Biden nominee faced pushback Tuesday after Republican Sen. Josh Hawley questioned Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, over the new administration’s immigration reform plans.
Earlier, Mayorkas faced questions over findings by the agency’s inspector general that he abused his power while at DHS under former President Barack Obama.
The delay in beginning the hearings means pressure to fill key appointments is heightened as Biden seeks to push through a broad legislative agenda and as lawmakers confront the looming prospect of a time-consuming Senate impeachment trial.
These efforts are helped by Democrats’ new, tiny majority in the Senate after two wins in Georgia this month.
In her new constitutional role as president of the Senate, Harris holds tiebreaking powers, including on nomination votes. With Harris’s vote added, the new 50-50 legislative split grants the Democratic Party the smallest possible legislative advantage.
She’ll exercise her presiding officer role for the first time on Wednesday to swear in the two new Georgia Democrats.
Aides have said they hope the White House will work with lawmakers on legislation that passes easily, but intra-party strife could pose a challenge to this.
New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker, a Democrat and Harris ally, said the former California senator might be in high demand.
“For the Biden-Harris agenda, she will be in Congress very, very often or reaching out to senators very often, to try to push that agenda through,” Booker told the New York Times.
As vice president under Obama, Biden brought his decadeslong ties to congressional lawmakers to the White House.
By contrast, Harris spent just four years in the Senate and enters an administration staffed with senior aides whose executive branch experience spans collective decades.
Where Biden, as vice president, was charged with overseeing the 2009 Recovery Act, Harris has instead been billed as something of an understudy to the president.
This largely undefined role is due to the coronavirus pandemic’s scale and urgency, a senior Harris aide told the Washington Examiner last month.
Observers note that Harris’s new Senate obligations could hamper her, tying her to the chamber when she could be building relationships with allies, or ramping up her foreign policy expertise, a relative weakness of her Democratic primary campaign.
“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.
A lawmaker could wind up on the floor at any time, meaning that Harris “is going to have to spend a lot of time working the Senate and sitting in the chair,” McKenna said. “It’s going to staple her to the Senate in a way I’m sure she’d rather not be.”
