WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday broke the record by casting the most tiebreaking votes in the Senate in U.S. history.
She has now broken 32 ties, beating the record of 31 that was set by John C. Calhoun, who was vice president from 1825 to 1832.
Harris broke a tie Tuesday on the nomination of Loren Alikhan to be a U.S. district judge for Washington, D.C.
In addition to serving in the executive branch, the vice president is also the president of the Senate, with the constitutional power to break ties.
Harris’ vote Tuesday also puts the U.S. at 300 tiebreaks 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.
It was less common for vice presidents to be called on to break Senate ties in recent administrations. Former Vice President Mike Pence cast 13 tiebreaking votes. President Joe Biden did not cast any when he was vice president in the Obama administration.
But the Senate has been narrowly divided during the entirety of the Biden administration. It is divided among 48 Democrats, 49 Republicans and three independents, two of whom caucus with Democrats: Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine. The third independent, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, left the Democratic Party last year 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 tiebreaking vote was on July 12. Twenty-five of her previous tiebreaking votes were on nominations that required Senate confirmation.
Congress has faced consistently low approval ratings for more than a decade. Seventy-two percent of Americans have unfavorable opinions 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, said Saint Louis University professor Joel Goldstein, an expert on the vice presidency.
"They typically hung out, you know, on Capitol Hill," Goldstein said of previous vice presidents.
"The vice presidency moved sort of into the executive branch really with the Nixon vice presidency," he added. Richard M. Nixon started his term as vice president in 1953 when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president after the Truman administration.
