Kamala Harris’s Senate tiebreakers offer road map for GOP attacks

Vice President Kamala Harris has cast the most tie-breaking Senate votes in U.S. history, a feat that’s underscored the increasingly partisan and divided nature of the upper chamber.

But the achievement also lays the groundwork for Republican attacks against Harris, the frontrunner to be the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee.

“It’s a big issue,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD) told the Washington Examiner. “That’s what campaigns are about. It should be about the issues, her record, and her views and how they differ and contrast with President Trump.”

Given the nature of the party-line votes, Harris is credited for pushing through some of the most divisive nominees and legislation in the Senate. Former President Donald Trump and down-ballot Republicans have taken notice, branding her as the liberal arbitrator responsible for many of Senate Democrats’ wins.

Harris has broken ties 33 times since 2021, including 27 times on nominees by President Joe Biden and six times on legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act and a nearly $2 trillion pandemic-era stimulus, per a Washington Examiner analysis.

Of her tie-breaking votes on nominees, nine were needed for final confirmation and another seven she helped advance by stepping in on procedural votes.  

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, is urging its candidates to emphasize that Harris “owns the Biden administration’s baggage and is an avowed radical” and is “arguably a bigger threat to Democrats’ Senate majority than Joe Biden.”

“The NRSC looks forward to welcoming Kamala Harris to every single swing state,” NRSC Spokesman Philip Letsou said. “The only question is whether vulnerable Democrat Senators will join her or continue to make up fake ‘scheduling conflicts.’”

Harris’s tiebreakers on legislation include an amendment and passage of a budget resolution in 2021 to lay the groundwork for Biden’s COVID-19 stimulus known as the American Rescue Plan, which Harris helped advance weeks later. They also include advancing Democrats’ tax-and-climate-spending package known as the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, an amendment to the bill, and final passage.

“She was the deciding vote on these massive spending programs that ignited inflation,” NRSC Chairman Steve Daines (R-MT) told the Washington Examiner. “She has so many vulnerabilities, and I just think the nation will not elect a far-left San Francisco liberal.”

Harris’s tiebreaking votes on nominees were for U.S. attorneys, judges, and officials at various federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, among others.

Trump noted Harris’s tiebreaking votes Wednesday during his rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, claiming her votes as having “created the worst inflation in a half a century, decimating middle-class families.”

Harris’s Senate record from 2017 until she became vice president in January 2021 is also under intense scrutiny. The non-partisan legislation tracker GovTrack in 2019 rated Harris as the most liberal senator based on measures she cosponsored. Considering her entire Senate tenure, GovTrack showed Harris as the seventh-most liberal senator when she left the chamber.

GovTrack has since scrubbed its site of the reference to Harris as the most liberal senator, saying in a Disclaimer on one of its pages that “Once the 2019-2020 session of Congress was complete, the statistics for the entire session and for Harris’s entire tenure in the senate showed a different story.”

“She’s the same as Biden, but much more radical,” Trump told reporters during a rare press call Tuesday. “She’s a radical left person, and this country doesn’t want a radical left person to destroy it. She’s far more radical than he is.”

An attack ad from David McCormick, the Pennsylvania Republican Senate nominee challenging Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), accentuated the anti-Harris messaging that down-ballot candidates are likely to pummel battleground Democrats with until Election Day. The spot notes her yearslong stances on contentious problems that tacked in line with the party’s progressive wing, including on energy, banning the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold, immigration, and crime.

Harris’s vice presidential record includes her role as Biden’s “border czar,” a position in which she was tasked in 2021 to identify the root causes of mass migrations during an influx of illegal southern border crossings.

Republicans moved to use Harris’s performance in the role as a cudgel against her in the days before Biden dropped out of the presidential race, increasing their criticism once she was endorsed by the president to succeed him atop the Democratic ticket. During his Wednesday rally, Trump sought to pin the blame on the border crisis on Harris as well, accusing her of throwing “our borders” and allowing “20 million illegal aliens to stampede into our country from all over the world.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a firebrand Republican and harsh critic of the Biden administration, told the Washington Examiner on Monday that Harris “owns” all the border policies that people are “fed up with.”

“Being the border czar, that one’s definitely her responsibility,” Greene said, adding that the failures of the Democrats have been “so incredible and horrific that we’re prepared to run against any of them.”