Booker, Harris have missed most Senate votes

Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who are among the six Democratic senators running for the White House, have missed the most votes in the Senate so far this year.

Booker and Harris have both missed 16 roll call votes on the Senate floor, according to a Hill analysis of the 77 total roll call votes the Senate has held since the start of the 116th Congress in January.

Spokespeople for Booker’s and Harris’s Senate offices didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about their votes. Their absences didn’t change the ultimate outcome of any of the votes.

{mosads}Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has missed seven votes so far this year, according to The Hill’s analysis, including a vote where Republicans squashed an effort to block the Trump administration from lifting sanctions against three business connected to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who are also running for the party’s nomination, have missed three votes each, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has missed one vote.

Harris’s missed votes include David Bernhardt’s nomination to be Interior and a slate of district judges.

She was campaigning in Iowa last Thursday, the same day the Senate held its final vote on Bernhardt.

Harris did put a statement into the Congressional Record specifying that had she been present, she would have opposed his nomination.

“I was absent for vote No. 77 on Executive Calendar No. 200, the nomination of David Bernhardt to be Secretary of the Interior. Had I been present, I would have voted no on the nomination,” Harris wrote.

Harris also missed the two votes where Republicans used the “nuclear option” to speed up confirmation of most of Trump’s nominees, as well as two failed votes on a stalled disaster aid package meant to respond to a spate of recent storms, wildfires and hurricanes.

Republicans criticized her for missing the disaster recovery votes, with the conservative group America Rising arguing that “running for president is more important to Harris than helping Californians.”

Booker’s missed votes also include Bernhardt’s nomination and a slate of district judges, both of which would have been able to pass without any Democratic support, assuming the Senate’s Republicans were present.

{mossecondads}Booker, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, was also the only senator to miss the vote confirming John Abizaid as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He also missed the formal roll out of Sanders’s “Medicare for All” bill, which he is supporting, but spoke at the North America’s Building Trades Unions conference in Washington on the same day. 

Republicans have also missed some roll call votes this year.

Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), who is up for reelection to his Senate seat next year, has missed 11 roll call votes so far this year, putting him in third place behind Harris and Booker for the number of missed Senate floor votes.

After that are Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) who have both missed eight votes, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has missed seven. None of the three senators are up for reelection in 2020.

It also isn’t the first time senators vying for their party’s presidential nomination have missed Senate votes.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who was in the middle of a White House bid, and Sanders led the Senate for the most votes missed during the first quarter of 2016. Cruz and Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who both ran for president in 2016, also missed the most Senate votes in 2015.

Rubio, who had the worst attendance record, missed 35 percent, or 120 of the 339 roll votes, during the past year, according to GovTrack at the time.