The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted Thursday to approve the nomination of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton , D-N.Y., to be secretary of State.

The 16-1 vote sets the stage for a quick vote on the Senate floor once President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in Jan. 20 and officially submits his nominations. Clinton is expected to easily be confirmed.

“Sen. Clinton did an outstanding job before the committee,” said Chairman John Kerry , D-Mass.

Sen. David Vitter , R-La., was the only member to vote against the nomination, and he did so by proxy. In a statement released before the vote, Vitter said, “Sen. Clinton is certainly a smart, capable colleague, and I take no pleasure in voting against her confirmation. But I must do so for one compelling reason. I believe President Clinton’s business and foundation dealings are a multi-million dollar minefield of conflicts of interest. And this could produce explosions at any minute, particularly concerning the Middle East where we least need them.”

Sen. Jim DeMint , R-S.C., supported Clinton’s nomination, but expressed continuing concerns about a possible conflict interest regarding the Clinton Foundation.

Kerry moved to report Clinton’s nomination out of the committee pending the receipt of formal nomination papers Tuesday, noting the “importance of getting a national security team in place as rapidly as possible”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev., said he was working to assure that Obama has his key team members in place “from day one.”

Clinton, who was first elected to the Senate in 2000 as her husband was wrapping up his second term as president, has not yet resigned from her Senate seat.

Clinton gave her farewell address to the chamber late in the morning, on the heels of a similar speech by Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. , a Delaware Democrat and the former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Biden’s resignation from the Senate will be effective at 5 p.m.. Ted Kaufman, one of his former aides, will be sworn in Friday to take Biden’s seat until a special election in 2010.

During a collegial hearing Tuesday, Clinton laid out a sweeping vision for a new U.S. foreign policy, as she highlighted almost every global challenge Obama’s administration will face. She touched on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change and global disease, tensions with Russia and China, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She did not offer many details on how she and Obama would tackle those problems, other than to emphasize that they would offer an approach vastly different than the Bush administration.

Clinton parried several questions about opening talks with Iran and Hamas, and she repeatedly expressed the need for “smart power,” a robust diplomatic and development machine that works in better equilibrium with the Defense Department.

Ranking Republican Richard G. Lugar of Indiana challenged Clinton to increase the transparency of former President Bill Clinton’s foundation work and funding sources. He said the only way to eliminate any perception of conflict would be for the foundation to forswear new foreign contributions. But Clinton made no such commitment.