Vice President Kamala Harris spent four years as one of 100 members of the Senate, forging relationships that are likely to be crucial should she win the presidency in November, but her most significant votes may have come after she left Capitol Hill for the White House.
As vice president, Ms. Harris is also the president of the closely divided Senate, where she has cast deciding votes on some of the biggest legislative achievements of the Biden era. She helped push through the $1.9 trillion Covid relief package and the landmark Inflation Reduction Act — both over the solid and strenuous opposition of Republicans. She also cleared the way for numerous confirmations of executive branch officials and federal judges to lifetime terms, amassing a record number of tiebreaking votes by a vice president.
“I can’t tell you how many times she rode to our rescue,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, worked with Ms. Harris on the often partisan panel.
Democrats gathered in Chicago for their party convention have celebrated her tiebreaking record, which is already the subject of Republican attacks, playing videos showing her bringing down the gavel on those big bills.
Like Barack Obama before her, Ms. Harris never became a creature of the Senate; she used her relatively short time there as a steppingstone to higher office and did not build the kind of reputation and record that come from investing decades in the institution. But in her role as a senator and then vice president, Ms. Harris did get a feel for the rhythms and vagaries of a legislative body that would be pivotal to her success should she become president.
Perhaps even more important, she built a circle of allies on Capitol Hill that could come in handy should she win the White House.
Senator Chris Coons, the Delaware Democrat who also sat with her on the Judiciary Committee, said a core group of Senate Democrats who worked with her on committees and legislation stands ready to provide a Senate support network for a potential President Harris.
“If she’s successful, we’ll have a transition and depending on who’s the leader and who is in the majority and minority, I think she could quickly build the relationships she needs to be successful in the Senate,” Mr. Coons said.
Ms. Harris’s rise has cemented the Senate’s status as an incubator of Democratic presidential hopefuls. She is the sixth consecutive Democratic presidential nominee who was either a senator or a former senator, following Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, Mr. Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.
After winning election to an open seat in 2016, Ms. Harris was aided in elevating her profile by Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader. He secured an exemption for her to sit on the prominent judiciary panel when a vacancy occurred, even though another California senator, Dianne Feinstein, was also a member, providing Ms. Harris a platform for fights over Supreme Court nominees.
On that committee, she gained respect from her colleagues for her feisty questioning style, honed over years as a prosecutor, in high-profile hearings grilling Trump administration officials.
“I really enjoyed how she would set up the questions,” recalled Senator Mazie K. Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, who sat next to her for four years. “Even when they couldn’t answer, the point would be made.”
She recalled Ms. Harris pressing William P. Barr, then the attorney general, about whether President Donald J. Trump had tried to intervene in Justice Department business.
“Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone? Yes or no?” When Mr. Barr paused and parsed the word “suggest,” she offered a follow-up: “Perhaps they’ve suggested, hinted?”
Her style left a lasting impression on Ms. Hirono. Ms. Harris, she said, “would set up her questions and really box them in.”
Mr. Schumer also steered her onto the Intelligence Committee, another plum perch for an ambitious lawmaker and a place for Ms. Harris to demonstrate her investigatory skills as the panel conducted a bipartisan inquiry into Russian election interference.
Her new colleagues found her impressive — and approachable.
“She’s just aggressively normal but unusually talented,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, who has become close with Ms. Harris. “She swears a bit, she laughs hard. You don’t feel like you’re necessarily interacting with someone who is potentially the leader of the free world. She actually makes people comfortable.”
Ms. Hirono recalled greeting her on the dais while the vice president was presiding over the Senate for a tiebreaking vote. When Ms. Hirono turned to leave, Ms. Harris noticed that her shawl was unraveling and stopped her.
“She called me back and she fixed my shawl,” Ms. Hirono said. “She’s just a very nice human being.”
Ms. Harris arrived in the Senate with a ready-made ally in Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a fellow state attorney general from Nevada who had worked with Ms. Harris on an array of neighboring border state issues and shared a political sensibility with the Californian. She said one of their first forays into policy was mounting a defense of the Affordable Care Act as Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans sought to repeal it.
Along with others such as Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey, Patty Murray of Washington and Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Ms. Cortez Masto and Ms. Harris have maintained close ties. Ms. Cortez Masto was called in to help the Harris campaign screen vice-presidential candidates, and spoke briefly at the convention on Wednesday night to extol Ms. Harris’s strengths.
“I think she knows she can trust me and I will always be honest with her,” Ms. Cortez Masto said in an interview, suggesting another key reason that Ms. Harris turned to her to help evaluate potential running mates: “And I come from a swing state.”
Republican senators see Ms. Harris as a partisan figure who entered the Senate with an eye toward bigger things. They noted that she quickly ditched her spot on the Environment and Public Works Committee for the more high-profile Judiciary Committee, where she could take part in the confirmation fights.
“She is the heart of the far left,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Senate Republican, who was the chairman of the environment panel. “She is a San Francisco liberal willing to change her positions for political purposes.”
The vice president’s campaign disputed the attack over partisanship.
“Throughout her entire career, Vice President Harris has fought for working families and taken on special interests — and won,” said Mia Ehrenberg, a spokeswoman for the campaign. “That includes in the Senate, where she worked across the aisle to both pass legislation and conduct critical national security investigations.”
Ms. Harris has tried to foster some Republican relationships and in 2021 hosted the women of the Senate for a dinner at the vice president’s residence, where she assured some skeptical guests that she had made the cheese puffs herself from scratch.
As a parting gift, she gave each attendee a “Kamala candle,” a signature item she created with a California-based artisan that is scented with jasmine and comes in a blue box emblazoned with the vice-presidential seal.
The cheese puff diplomacy worked, to a degree.
Senator Marsha Blackburn, a hard-right Republican from Tennessee, told Fox News after the dinner that “it was a lovely evening; it was a completely social evening centered on relationship building.” People talked about their families, she said, noting, “We didn’t talk shop.”
Ms. Harris also likes to talk about the art she has curated to display at her Naval Observatory residence, including the Black artists she showcases on the walls, according to other senators who have visited her there.
Still, two Republican senators did not attend her dinner and Mr. Coons noted that it can be hard in the Senate to forge relationships across the aisle when lawmakers are engaged in showdowns such as Supreme Court confirmations.
“For any Democrat, particularly one so visible in some of the more partisan hearings of the Trump era, it is tough to have really close relationships with Republicans,” he said. “But I’ve been surprised by several who have confidentially said positive things to me about her.”
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