Harris and Sotomayor will exchange only a few words as they recite and repeat the vice president’s oath, but their presence will mark perhaps the strongest visual hint of an abrupt change of course.
In choosing Sotomayor to administer the oath, Harris chose an ideological sister who followed the same path, fraught with family obstacles, to mark a turn in the direction of the country. As Sotomayor speaks the 71 words of the oath, Harris will become the first black vice president, a woman born to an Indian mother and Jamaican American father, and she will join Sotomayor in a small society of women at the top of the government.
Harris was inspired by Sotomayor’s legacy, said a source familiar with the decision.
For progressives – especially young women, daughters of immigrants, African Americans, Indian Americans, Jamaican Americans, Latinos, children of the projects – the vision of the two women together will send out a strong signal as a new government is established.
Harris is the daughter of Donald Harris, an economist and professor emeritus of Stanford, and the late Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a civil rights advocate and Indian-born breast cancer researcher.
Abby Phillip of CNN asked Harris last week about his mother.
“Do you think she always saw this for you, in you? Did she raise you to do this?” Phillip asked.
“She didn’t raise me to be vice president of the United States,” replied Harris, laughing. “But she raised my sister and me to believe that we could do anything if we work hard – and there you are.”
At his own confirmation hearing in 2009, Sotomayor praised his mother, Celina Baez, and remembered his family in a similar way. Sotomayor’s parents left Puerto Rico during World War II and she grew up under modest circumstances in a Bronx housing project. Her father, Juan, a factory worker with a third-degree education, died when she was 9, and her mother was left to raise Sotomayor and her brother alone.
“My life progression was exclusively American,” said Sotomayor, noting that his mother taught him that the key to success was good education. “And she set an example, studying alongside my brother and me at the kitchen table so she could become a registered nurse.”
This will be the second time that Sotomayor will administer the vice president oath. She swore Biden in 2013 for his second term as vice president.
And, of course, Harris and Sotomayor share a similar ideological view – and an unwavering distaste for President Donald Trump’s policies.
Harris attacked the president of the political arena, opposing his policy. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she closely observed Trump’s goals of transforming the judiciary. She interrogated her Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, as well as the myriad of first instance judges who appeared on the committee as Trump, with a singular focus, transformed the face of the courts.
Harris has already chosen to fill his new team with an unusual number of individuals who see court orders as a priority, unlike the early days of the Obama administration.
Sotomayor, from his position outside the political realm, has fiercely resisted over the past four years over the legality of Trump’s controversial policies that have ricocheted in the courts.
Last week, his concerns were evident in a case involving federal executions.
Last Friday, with the execution of Dustin John Higgs, the government executed its 13th inmate in six months. In July 2019, then Attorney General William Barr reinstated the federal death penalty after a break of almost two years, despite doubts surrounding the chosen drug protocol and requests for further deliberation.
The country may have been distracted by the proceedings against Trump, twice accused of impeachment, but Sotomayor issued a dissent in the early morning of 10 pages. Putting the government’s action in context, she said: “The Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the past six months as in the previous six decades.” Citing arguments presented by prisoners and judges in opinions of lower courts that were reversed, Sotomayor wrote: “This is not justice.”
Earlier this month, when the court granted the Trump administration’s request to reinstate restrictions for patients seeking to obtain a medication used for early abortions, Sotomayor, along with Judge Elena Kagan, disagreed. She called the Food and Drug Administration’s demands “an unjustifiable, irrational and undue burden on women seeking abortion” during a pandemic.
Addressing the next government, she added: “We can only hope that the government will reconsider and demonstrate greater care and empathy for women who seek some measure of control over their health and reproductive life in these difficult times.”
On Wednesday, Trump will not be on stage, having decided to break the usual protocol by leaving office. But the two women, who have traveled similar trails, will recite the oath as the nation begins a new chapter.
CNN’s Jasmine Wright contributed to this report.