highest-ranking female elected official in U.S. history, and the first African-American and first Asian-American vice president. She is also the second person of color to hold the post, preceded by Charles Curtis, a Native American and member of the Kaw Nation, who served under Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933. She is the third person with acknowledged non-European ancestry to reach one of the highest offices in the executive branch, after Curtis and former president Barack Obama. Harris resigned her Senate seat on January 18, 2021, two days before her swearing-in as vice president. Her first act as vice president was swearing in her replacement Alex Padilla and Georgia senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who were elected in the 2021 Georgia runoff elections. Since January 20, 2021, the current 117th Congress's Senate has been divided 50–50 between Republicans and Democrats; this meant that Harris had to be frequently called upon to cast tiebreaking votes. Harris cast her first of two tie-breaking votes on February 5, 2021. In February and March, Harris's tie-breaking votes in her role as President of the Senate were crucial in passing the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 stimulus package proposed by President Biden since no Republicans in the Senate voted for the package. On July 20, 2021, Harris broke Mike Pence's record for tie-breaking votes in the first year of a vice presidency when she cast the seventh tie-breaking vote in her first six months. As of November 2021, Harris has cast 13 tie-breaking votes during her first year in office, the most tie-breaking votes in a single year in U.S. history, surpassing John Adams who cast 12 votes in 1790. In a debunked story by the New York Post in April 2021, it was claimed that Harris's children's book Superheroes Are Everywhere was being distributed en masse through "welcome kits" given to migrant children at a shelter in Long Beach, California. In reality, only a single copy of the book had been donated by a member of the public. The writer of the original story, Laura Italiano, claimed that she was forced to write the story against her will and she resigned from the New York Post as a result. In April 2021, Harris indicated that she was the last person in the room before President Biden decided to remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and commented that the president has "an extraordinary