Vice President Harris breaks record for casting the most tie-breaking votes
WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday broke the record by casting the most tie-breaking votes in the Senate in U.S. history.
She has now broken 32 ties, beating the previous record of 31 that was set by John C. Calhoun, who was vice president from 1825 to 1832.
Harris' tie-breaking vote on Tuesday came on the nomination of Loren Alikhan to be a U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia.
In addition to serving in the executive branch, vice presidents are also the president of the Senate, giving them the constitutional power to break ties.
Her Tuesday vote also puts the U.S. at 300 tie breaks since 1789, according to Senate records.
Immediately after her history-making vote, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., took to the Senate floor to congratulate Harris, noting that the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan and other key Biden administration achievements would not have passed Congress without her vote. Off the floor, Schumer presented Harris with a golden gavel to commemorate the occasion.
Vice presidents being called on to break ties in the Senate was less common in recent administrations. Former Vice President Mike Pence cast 13 tie-breaking votes. President Joe Biden did not cast any tie-breaking votes when he was vice president in the Obama administration.
But the Senate has been narrowly divided during the entirety of the Biden administration. The Senate is currently divided between 48 Democrats, 49 Republicans and three independents, though two of the independents caucus with Democrats: Sens. Bernie Sanders and Angus King. The third independent, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, left the Democratic Party in 2022 to register as an independent.
During the 117th Congress, which ran from 2021 to 2023, the Senate was evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, including independents Sanders and King.
Before Tuesday, Harris’s most recent tie-break vote was on July 12. Twenty-five of her previous tie-breaking votes were regarding nominations that required Senate confirmation.
Congress has faced consistently low approval ratings for more than a decade. Seventy-two percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Congress, according to a Pew poll conducted in July.
Vice presidents’ Senate duties used to be one of their primary responsibilities, all the way up through the Truman administration, explained Joel Goldstein, Saint Louis University professor and vice presidency expert.
"They typically hung out, you know, on Capitol Hill," Goldstein said of prior vice presidents.
"The vice presidency moved sort of into the executive branch really with the Nixon vice presidency," Goldstein added. Nixon started his term as vice president in 1953 when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president following the Truman administration.
