US VP-ELECT, KAMALA HARRIS, WOMAN ON HISTORY LANE

US VP-ELECT, KAMALA HARRIS, WOMAN ON HISTORY LANE

United States Vice-President-elect, Kamala Devi Harris, 56, made history as the first woman to be elected to that office. The flamboyant member of the Democratic Party is set to assume office on January 20, 2021, alongside president-elect Joe Biden. They defeated incumbent President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in the 2020 presidential election.

Harris has served as the junior United States senator from California since 2017. Harris will be the first Asian-American, the first African-American, and the first female vice president in U.S. history, and thus, the highest-ranking female elected official in United States history. Being of both Indian Tamil and Afro-Caribbean ancestry, Harris is a multiracial American that typifies the American dream.

The Vice-President-elect was born in Oakland, California and graduated from Howard University before proceeding to the University of California, Hastings College of Law. She began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, before being recruited to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and later the City Attorney of San Francisco‘s office. In 2003, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco. She was elected Attorney General of California in 2010 and re-elected in 2014.

Harris defeated Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 Senate election to become the second African American woman and the first South Asian American to serve in the United States Senate. As a senator, she has advocated for healthcare reform, federal rescheduling of cannabis, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the DREAM Act, a ban on assault weapons, and progressive tax reform. She gained a national profile for her pointed questioning of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings, including Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault.

Harris ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and attracted national attention before ending her campaign on December 3, 2019. She was announced as Biden’s running mate on August 11, 2020. On November 7, 2020, the race was called in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket. She will be the second vice president of significant non-European ancestry, following Charles Curtis, who served from 1929 to 1933 alongside President Herbert Hoover.

Harris embraced African-American culture from an early age, largely because of her Indian mother, who, in addition to being a breast cancer researcher, had also been a prominent civil rights activist.

With Biden’s victory in the presidential elections, Harris will become the first female in the country’s history to assume the position of vice-president.

Her Indian mother and Jamaican father met at a civil rights demonstration, making a very decent case for the famed ’American Dream’. Kamala and Maya, her sister, also grew up going to these demonstrations which led them to learn a lot about the situation in the country.

However, this is not the first glass ceiling that the Democrat has broken. In 2011 she was the first female Attorney General of California, and years later she became the second black woman in the Senate, a job she still performs representing the state of California.

Her background in criminal justice could help a Biden administration tackle the issues of racial equality and policing after the country was swept by protests this year. She is expected to be a top adviser on judicial nominations.

Harris, who developed a deep fundraising network during her Senate and White House bids, has been instrumental to Biden’s raking in record sums of money in the closing months of the campaign. Her selection sparked a burst of excitement in the Democratic base and among the party’s donors.

“Harris always made the most sense as a running mate for Biden because she had the ability to help him unify the Democratic coalition across racial and generational lines and was able to spike base enthusiasm,” said Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist who worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

• SOURCE: Wikepedia