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Harris and Sotomayor will exchange just a few words as they recite and repeat the Vice Presidential Oath, but their presence will perhaps mark the strongest visual signal of a sudden change of course.
In choosing Sotomayor to take the oath, Harris chose an ideological sister who took the same path, littered with familiar obstacles, to mark a turn towards the country. As Sotomayor takes the 71-word oath, Harris will become the first black female vice president, a woman born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican American father, and she will join Sotomayor in a small society of women at the highest level. of the government. .
Harris was inspired by Sotomayor’s legacy, a source close to the ruling said.
For progressives – especially young women, immigrant daughters, African Americans, American Indians, Jamaicans, Latin Americans, the kids of the projects – the sight of the two women together will send a strong signal. as a new government takes hold.
Harris is the daughter of Donald Harris, economist and professor emeritus at Stanford, and the late Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a civil rights activist and breast cancer researcher born in India.
CNN’s Abby Phillip asked Harris last week about her mother.
“Do you think she always saw that for you, in you?” Did she raise you to do this? Phillip inquired.
“She didn’t elevate me to vice president of the United States,” Harris replied with a laugh. “But she raised me and my sister to believe that we could do anything if we put the hard work into it – and there you are.”
During her own confirmation hearing in 2009, Sotomayor congratulated her mother, Celina Baez, and recalled her family in the same way. Sotomayor’s parents left Puerto Rico during World War II and she grew up in humble circumstances in a Bronx housing project. Her father, Juan, a factory worker with a third grade education, died when she was 9, and her mother was left to raise Sotomayor and her brother alone.
“The progression of my life has been uniquely American,” Sotomayor said, noting that his mother taught him that the key to success was a good education. “And she set an example by studying with my brother and I at our kitchen table so that she could become a registered nurse.”
This will be the second time that Sotomayor will administer the Vice President’s oath. She swore to Biden in 2013 for her second term as vice president.
And of course, Harris and Sotomayor share a similar ideological outlook – and an unwavering loathing for the policies of President Donald Trump.
Harris attacked the president of the political arena, opposing his policies. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she closely followed Trump’s goals of transforming the justice system. She grilled her Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, as well as the myriad of lower court justices who appeared before the committee as Trump, with particular emphasis transformed the face. courts.
Harris has already chosen to staff his new staff with an unusual number of people who see judicial appointments as a priority, unlike in the early days of the Obama administration.
Sotomayor, from his perch outside the political realm, has fiercely pushed back over the past four years to the legality of Trump’s controversial policies that have ricocheted through 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 nearly two-year hiatus despite questions surrounding the chosen drug protocol and calls for more deliberation.
The country may have been distracted by the proceedings against Trump on two occasions, but Sotomayor published a late 10-page dissent. 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 than it did in the previous six decades.” Citing arguments made by inmates and judges in lower court opinions that had been overturned, Sotomayor wrote: “This is not justice.”
Earlier this month, when the court upheld the Trump administration’s demand to reinstate restrictions on patients seeking medication used to abort early in pregnancy, Sotomayor, joined by Judge Elena Kagan, said expressed his dissent. She called the Food and Drug Administration’s demands “an unjustifiable, irrational and undue burden on women seeking abortions” during a pandemic.
Addressing the new administration, she added: “One can only hope that the government will reconsider and show greater care and empathy for women who seek some measure of control over their health and their lives. reproductive health in these troubling times. “
Trump will not be on stage on Wednesday, having decided to break with usual protocol by stepping down. But the two women, who have charted similar leads, will recite the oath as the nation watches a new chapter.
CNN’s Jasmine Wright contributed to this report.
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