U.S. vice president breaks nearly 200-year-old record for tie-breaking Senate votes

Kamala Harris on Tuesday set the record for breaking the most ties in the Senate by a U.S. vice president as she cast a vote to confirm U.S. President Joe Biden's nominee, Loren AliKhan, to become the first South Asian woman judge on the federal district court in Washington.

The record Harris broke had stood for almost two centuries. Harris has now cast 33 Senate tie-breaking votes, exceeding the 31 cast by John Calhoun when he was vice president from 1825 to 1832.

The Senate, narrowly controlled by Biden's fellow Democrats, confirmed the District of Columbia Court of Appeals judge to a seat on the federal bench in the U.S. capital by a margin of 51-50 after Harris, a former senator from California, cast the tie-breaking vote. As vice president, Harris is also the Senate's president and breaks ties when they arise.

As they have with many Biden judicial nominees, Republicans opposed AliKhan, citing stances she previously took as a District of Columbia government official. Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat, voted with the Republicans, necessitating the Harris tie-breaking vote.

Earlier in the day, Harris broke a tie on a procedural vote to allow AliKhan's nomination to move to a final confirmation vote. With those votes, Biden has now secured confirmation of 161 judicial nominees.

Democrats hold a slim 51-49 majority in a chamber riven with partisan differences.

Harris's most recent tie-breaking vote was cast for another personnel appointment in July, when American historian Joel K. Goldstein criticized the political climate of the United States.

"Our politics is so polarized that, even on the sort of matters that in the past would have flown through, it takes the vice president to cast a tiebreaking vote," Goldstein told the Associated Press.

The U.S. public was "highly critical" of the impact of partisan polarization on politics, according to the findings of a poll by the Pew Research Center released in September.

More than 86 percent Americans agreed that "Republicans and Democrats are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems," according to the poll.

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(With input from Reuters)