Newsom fills Harris Senate seat with Padilla
By : Brody Levesque via THE WASHINGTON BLADE, COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL LGBT MEDIA ASSOCIATION December 28, 2020
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ABOVE: Sen.-designate Alex Padilla, photo via Padilla’s Facebook page.
SACRAMENTO | In 1994, after California voters passed Proposition 187, the sweeping anti-immigrant measure, his parents finally applied for citizenship and Padilla, now a recent MIT graduate, resolved to put an engineering career aside and dedicate his life to public service.
In his first run for elected office Padilla was elected to the Los Angeles City Council as a political outsider at the age of 26. Later, in 2001, Padilla’s LA city council colleagues elected him the youngest Council President in Los Angeles history. In 2006, he was elected to the State Senate to represent the more than 1 million people in the San Fernando Valley.
Newsom fills Harris Senate seat with Padilla
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Governor Gavin Newsom’s selection of Alex Padilla, a Pacoima-raised son of working-class Mexican immigrants, to represent California in the U.S. Senate is being celebrated by many Latino and Latina leaders. One in three residents of California identifies as Latino or Hispanic, but he will be the first Latino to ever represent the state in the Senate.
“Alex is a role model to so many Latino youth in our state, and I know that his appointment as our senator will show every Latino child that anything is possible in our nation,” Lucille Roybal-Allard, who represents portions of East and South Los Angeles in Congress, told NBC News.
Kamala Harris was only the second Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate in American history, and, until she is inaugurated into her new job as Vice President next month, she is the sole Black woman currently sitting in that chamber. When her ascension opened a space for Gavin Newsom to fill, some called on him to select another Black woman who would maintain that toe-hold of representation, launching a social media campaign to #KeepTheSeat. Today, it was revealed that Newsom had instead selected current California Secretary of State Alex Padilla.
“We continue to say that we win with Black women and that Black women have been the backbone of our democracy, but still too often when it comes to putting a Black woman in a seat of power, we are an afterthought,” says Stefanie Brown James, cofounder and executive director of the Collective PAC, an organization that supports Black political candidates, wrote in a statement. “What does it say about our democracy to leave the most pow
Newly Appointed Calif. Senator Alex Padilla Faces GOP-Sought Probe Over State Contract Newsweek 22/12/2020 Matthew Impelli © Handout/Getty In this screenshot from the DNCC’s livestream of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla addresses the virtual convention on August 20, 2020.
Alex Padilla, who was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to be the state s next senator, filling the seat held by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, faces a GOP-sought probe over his involvement in a political consulting firm s state contract. The son of Mexican immigrants a cook and house cleaner Alex Padilla worked his way from humble beginnings to the halls of MIT, the Los Angeles City Council and the State Senate, and has become a national defender of voting rights as California s Secretary of State, Newsom wrote in a statement announcing Padilla s appointment. Now, he will serve in the halls of our nation s Capitol
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