Vice President of the U...: West's Encyclopedia of American Law (Full Article) from Answers.com

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the vice presidents of the United States started out as strong and independent national executives. The U.S. Constitution of 1787 created the office largely as a realistic backup in the very likely event of a president's death or disability. While it was true that, apart from serving as a backup, the vice president had no other official function than to preside over the Senate and break its tie votes, he was initially elected independently—in a separate election—by the electoral college. Just how significant that could be, quickly became clear. The first two vice presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, were subsequently elected president. Each election forced a political crisis, and the Constitution had to be amended to water down the independence of the office (the Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804).

When Vice President John Adams ran to succeed George Washington as president in 1796, he won a close election in the electoral college. His running mate on the Federalist Party ticket, Thomas Pinckney, who should have become vice president based on number of popular votes he received, did not become vice president because he could not officially run as a subordinate part of that ticket. Instead, Thomas Jefferson, who received second highest number of votes, became vice president. There were thus four official candidates for president in the eyes of the Constitution, whatever the political parties and the voters thought. So in 1797, despite what the popular vote mandated, the Democratic-Republican presidential candidate, Thomas Jefferson, the political opponent of Adams, won more electoral votes than Pinckney and became vice president.

A different configuration of the same flaw in the Constitution was exposed in the election of 1800. Jefferson's Democratic-Republican running mate, Aaron Burr, running as a legal equal in the electoral college, tied Jefferson in the college's presidential vote. It was left to the losing Federalists to broker Jefferson's election in the House of Representatives, a travesty of the democratic process, in 1801.

This second straight display of vice presidential political muscle finally caused Congress and the states to rectify the weakness of the Constitution's provision governing the office; the nation officially recognized the reality of party tickets in presidential elections and passed an amendment overtly pairing presidential and vice presidential candidates on one ballot in the electoral college. No vice president would become president via election until the twentieth century. After 1801 the office of vice president held little political power for a hundred years.

In the course of the nineteenth century, the vice presidents who assumed the presidency on the death of the incumbent were generally regarded as caretakers of the office, not real presidents. Indeed, the first of these, John Tyler, who became president on the death of William Henry Harrison in 1841, was widely called "His Accidency" by his many political opponents. Millard Fillmore in 1850, Andrew Johnson in 1865, and Chester Alan Arthur in 1881 fared little better.

The travails of John Calhoun as vice president amply illustrate the minefield a sitting vice president had to negotiate in trying to improve his lot. A political power in his own right, Calhoun decided in 1824 to accept a vice presidential election in the electoral college when he became the only declared candidate for the office among the presidential candidates being considered in the confused and largely partyless presidential election of that year. Calhoun decided to bide his time and use his considerable political clout in the South to support John Quincy Adams for president over Andrew Jackson, the top vote getter in both the popular vote and the electoral college. Calhoun became vice president in 1825, chafed under the weaknesses of the office for four years, yet threw in his lot with an older and seemingly fragile Andrew Jackson in 1828. Calhoun agreed to run again for vice president, and he won, but fumed over Jackson's popular and political success and staying power. Jackson's nationalist agenda infuriated the southern vice president, in an office without authority. In a graphic example of the depths to which the office had sunk, Calhoun resigned it in 1832 to take a South Carolina seat in the U.S. Senate. He never again came close to the presidency he so deeply craved. Nor did any other vice president in the nineteenth century win the presidency in his own right. (Two other vice presidents would resign their offices: Ulysses Grant's running mate, Schuyler Colfax, in 1873, and Richard Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, exactly a century later, both departed the office facing indictments on convincing evidence of corruption.)

The twentieth century's vice presidents fared much better. Beginning in 1901 and through the 1960s, four who succeeded to the presidency on the death of the incumbent gained the presidency in the succeeding election. The first of these, Theodore Roosevelt, was a sometime historian who knew about his vice presidential predecessors' fates. He moved vigorously, upon becoming president in 1901 following the death of William McKinley, to solidify his grip on the office and on the Republican Party as well. Only forty-three and a hero of the Spanish-American War, he broke with McKinley's conservative reverence for corporate business and adopted a populist stance in the areas of antitrust legislation, conservation of resources, foreign policy, and at least limited recognition of organized labor. In 1904 he became the first vice president since Thomas Jefferson to be elected in his own right.

Few ever again raised the question of the succeeding vice president as caretaker for a fallen president. Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded Warren Harding in 1923, though neither as aggressive nor as charismatic as Teddy Roosevelt, had no trouble gaining election in his own right in 1924. Harry Truman some twenty years later faced a much higher hurdle; no vice president succeeded to the presidential office with less esteem than he did. He succeeded Franklin Roosevelt, an iconic preserver of capitalism in the Great Depression of the 1930s and a towering leader in World War II. Truman had been a U.S. senator of middling importance until 1944, tainted by his ties to the corrupt Pendergast machine in his native Missouri. But the indefatigable Truman acted decisively to end the war by using the atomic bomb against Japan, a perilous move; controversy and iconoclasm became the hallmarks of his tenure as president. He took on a conservative Republican Congress as a champion of organized labor and anticommunism. Running hard in 1948 as a populist, he was elected in his own right in the presidential election upset of the century.

When Lyndon Johnson succeeded to the presidency after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, he emulated Truman's model. Like Truman, Johnson had displayed little evidence in his long senatorial career that he would emerge as a populist reformer. Chosen for the ticket by a reluctant Kennedy because he needed John-son's clout in the South, Johnson never was in the presidential loop. But after the assassination and succession, which was closely recorded on television and placed all Americans in the events, Johnson moved quickly to reassure the American people and proclaim his support for both JFK's liberal domestic agenda and his confrontational anticommunist foreign policy. It was surprising because Johnson had always, as a power in the Senate, been constrained by his southern constituency. Leaving that behind him now, he championed the "Great Society," an amalgam of civil rights, pro-labor, and antipoverty reform. Like his successful predecessors in the twentieth century, Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Johnson made populist reform his ticket to a full presidential term. Unlike his two predecessors, though, he pursued a foreign policy that foundered and eventually did him in. As aggressive as Teddy Roosevelt and Truman in his worldview, Johnson embraced an anticommunist activism that led him deeper into the national and international morass of Vietnam and undermined a considerable and still impressive domestic reformist political record.

Gerald Ford was the fifth and final notable vice president of the twentieth century. Not elected as a running mate on Richard Nixon's presidential ticket, he succeeded to the presidency in 1974 after Nixon's nomination for his vice presidency was approved by Congress in 1973 under the terms of the 1951 Presidential Succession Act. His rise to vice president, and then president, was part of a complicated maneuver necessitated by the growing possibility of Nixon's impeachment and removal from office over the Watergate scandal as well as the unacceptability of Vice President Agnew's succeeding to the presidency, laboring as he was under the taint of corruption. Ford, too, in the manner of Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson, became a vigorous president from 1974 to 1977, restoring both the dignity and the authority of the office after the Nixon debacle. But he was undone by his hasty—if healing—presidential pardon of Richard Nixon.

The office of vice president was rejuvenated in the twentieth century, returned to its eighteenth century vigor and meaningfulness. By the 1980s, partly as a result of history's lessons of the need for a vice president of stature, presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush have afforded their vice presidents increasing access to the Oval Office, more visibility, and increasing responsibility in their own right, as the Constitution of 1787 had intended.

Bibliography

Elkins, Stanley, and Eric McKitrick. The Age of Federalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Ferrell, Robert. Harry S. Truman and the Modern American Presidency. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983.

Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.

Pessen, Edward. Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Vice President of the United States of America
Official seal
Incumbent Joe Biden since January 20, 2009
Style	The Honorable
Residence	Number One Observatory Circle
Term length	Four years
Inaugural holder	John Adams April 21, 1789
Formation	U.S. Constitution March 4, 1789
Succession	First
Website	Vice President Joe Biden

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The Vice President of the United States is the holder of a public office created by the United States Constitution. The vice president, together with the President of the United States, is indirectly elected by the people through the Electoral College to a four-year term. The vice president is the first person in the presidential line of succession, ascending to the presidency upon the death, resignation, or removal of the president.

Under the Constitution, the vice president is President of the Senate. By virtue of the vice president's role as President of the Senate, he or she is the nominal head of the United States Senate. In that capacity, the vice president is allowed to vote in the Senate, but only when necessary to break a tied vote. Pursuant to the Twelfth Amendment, the vice president presides over the joint session of Congress when it convenes to count the vote of the Electoral College.

While the vice president's only constitutionally prescribed functions, aside from presidential succession, relate to his role as President of the Senate, the office is now commonly viewed as a member of the executive branch of the federal government. The U.S. Constitution does not expressly assign the office to any one branch, causing scholars to dispute whether it belongs to the executive branch, the legislative branch, or both.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] The modern view of the vice president as a member of the executive branch is due in part to the assignment of executive duties to the vice president by either the president or Congress, though such activities are only recent historical developments.^[1]^[3]

The incumbent vice president is Joe Biden, previously the senior U.S. Senator from the state of Delaware, and a current member of the Democratic Party.

Origin

The Flag of the Vice President of the United States

The creation of the office of Vice President was a direct consequence of the Electoral College. Delegates to the Philadelphia Convention gave each state a number of presidential electors equal to that state's combined share of House and Senate seats. Yet, the delegates worried each elector would only favor his own state's favorite son candidate, resulting in deadlocked elections producing no winner. To counter this presumed difficulty, the delegates gave each presidential elector two votes, required at least one of those votes be for a candidate from outside the elector's state, and mandated that the winner of the election have an absolute majority with respect to the number of electors. With these rules in place, the delegates hoped each electors' second vote would go to a statesman of national character.^[5]

However, fearing electors may throw away their second vote in order to bolster their favorite son's chance at winning, the Philadelphia delegates specified that the runner-up in the election would become Vice President. Creating this new office gave a real consequence to discarding votes, and required electors staidly cast their second ballots.^[5]

Roles of the Vice President

The Constitution limits the formal powers and role of Vice President to becoming President should the President become unable to serve (due to the death, resignation, or medical impairment of the President), and to acting as the presiding officer of the U.S. Senate.

President of the United States Senate

As President of the Senate, the Vice President has two primary duties: to cast a vote in the event of a Senate deadlock and to preside over and certify the official vote count of the U.S. Electoral College. For example, in the first half of 2001, the Senators were divided 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats and Dick Cheney's tie-breaking vote gave the Republicans the Senate majority. (See 107th United States Congress.)

Regular duties

As President of the Senate (Article I, Section 3, Clause 4), the Vice President oversees procedural matters and may cast a tie-breaking vote. There is a strong convention within the U.S. Senate that the Vice President not use their position as President of the Senate to influence the passage of legislation or act in a partisan manner, except in the case of breaking tie votes. As President of the Senate, John Adams cast twenty-nine tie-breaking votes, a record that no successor except for John C. Calhoun ever threatened. His votes protected the president's sole authority over the removal of appointees, influenced the location of the national capital, and prevented war with Great Britain. On at least one occasion he persuaded senators to vote against legislation that he opposed, and he frequently addressed the Senate on procedural and policy matters. Adams's political views and his active role in the Senate made him a natural target for critics of George Washington's administration. Toward the end of his first term, as a result of a threatened resolution that would have silenced him except for procedural and policy matters, he began to exercise more restraint in the hope of realizing the goal shared by many of his successors: election in his own right as president of the United States.

In modern times, the Vice President rarely presides over day-to-day matters in the Senate; in his place, the Senate chooses a President pro tempore (or "president for a time") to preside in the Vice President's absence; the Senate normally selects the longest-serving senator in the majority party. The President pro tempore has the power to appoint any other senator to preside and in practice, junior senators from the majority party are assigned the chore of presiding over the Senate at most times.

Except for this tie-breaking role, the Standing Rules of the Senate do not vest any significant responsibilities in the Vice President. Rule XIX, which governs debate, does not authorize the Vice President to participate in debate, and grants only to members of the Senate (and, upon appropriate notice, former presidents of the United States) the privilege of addressing the Senate, without granting a similar privilege to the sitting Vice President. Thus, as Time Magazine wrote during the controversial tenure of Vice President Charles G. Dawes, "once in four years the Vice President can make a little speech, and then he is done. For four years he then has to sit in the seat of the silent, attending to speeches ponderous or otherwise, of deliberation or humor."^[6]

Recurring, infrequent duties

The President of the Senate also presides over counting and presentation of the votes of the Electoral College. This process occurs in the presence of both houses of Congress, generally on January 6 of the year following a U.S. presidential election.^[7] In this capacity, only four Vice Presidents have been able to announce their own election to the presidency: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, and George H. W. Bush. At the beginning of 1961, it fell to Richard Nixon to preside over this process, which officially announced the election of his 1960 opponent, John F. Kennedy. In 2001, Al Gore announced the election of his opponent, George W. Bush. In 1969, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey would have announced the election of his opponent, Richard Nixon; however, on the date of the Congressional joint session (January 6), Humphrey was in Norway attending the funeral of Trygve Lie, the first elected Secretary-General of the United Nations^[8].

The President of the Senate may also preside over most of the impeachment trials of federal officers. However, whenever the President is impeached, the Chief Justice of the United States presides over the Senate for the trial. This duty may include the ability for the Vice President to preside over his or her own impeachment, although legal theory and scholars suggest the law would not allow any person to be the judge in a case where they are the defendant.^{[citation needed]} If the Vice President is not present to preside over an impeachment trial, the duty falls to the Senate's Presiding Officer.

Succession and the Twenty-fifth Amendment

John Tyler was first Vice President to assume the Presidency following the death his predecessor.

The U.S. Constitution provides that should the president die or become disabled while in office, the "powers and duties" of the office are transferred to the Vice President. Initially, it was unclear whether the Vice President actually became the new president or merely acting president. This was first tested in 1841 with the death of President William Henry Harrison. Harrison's Vice President, John Tyler, asserted that he had succeeded to the full presidential office, powers, and title, and declined to acknowledge documents referring to him as "Acting President." Despite some strong calls against it, Tyler took the oath of office, as the tenth president. Tyler's claim was not challenged legally, and so the precedent of full succession was established. This was made explicit by Section 1 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1967.

Section 2 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment provides that:

Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

Gerald Ford was the first Vice President selected by this method, after the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1973; after succeeding to the Presidency, Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller as Vice President.

President Lyndon Johnson is sworn in following the assassination of President John Kennedy.

Another issue was who had the power to declare that an incapacitated president is unable to discharge his duties. This question had arisen most recently with the illnesses of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Section 3 and Section 4 of the amendment provide means for the Vice President to become Acting President upon the temporary disability of the president. Section 3 deals with self-declared incapacity of the president. Section 4 deals with incapacity declared by the joint action of the Vice President and of a majority of the Cabinet.

While Section 4 has never been invoked, section 3 has been invoked three times: on July 13, 1985 when Ronald Reagan underwent surgery to remove cancerous polyps from his colon, and twice more on June 29, 2002 and July 21, 2007 when George W. Bush underwent colonoscopy procedures requiring sedation. Prior to this amendment, Vice President Richard Nixon informally replaced President Dwight Eisenhower for several weeks on each of three occasions when Eisenhower was ill.

Informal roles

The extent of any informal roles and functions of the Vice President depend on the specific relationship between the President and the Vice President, but often include tasks such as drafter and spokesperson for the administration's policies, adviser to the President, and being a symbol of American concern or support. The influence of the Vice President in this role depends almost entirely on the characteristics of the particular administration. Dick Cheney, for instance, was widely regarded as one of President George W. Bush's closest confidants. Al Gore was an important adviser to President Bill Clinton on matters of foreign policy and the environment. Often, Vice Presidents will take harder-line stands on issues to ensure the support of the party's base while deflecting partisan criticism away from the President.^{[citation needed]}

Under the American system the President is both head of state and head of government, and the ceremonial duties of the former position are often delegated to the Vice President. The Vice President may meet with other heads of state or attend state funerals in other countries, at times when the administration wishes to demonstrate concern or support but cannot send the President himself. Not all Vice Presidents are happy in their jobs. John Nance Garner, who served as Vice President from 1933 to 1941 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, remarked that the Vice Presidency wasn't "worth a pitcher of warm piss,"^[9] although reporters allegedly changed the last word to "spit" to make the quote suitable for print.

Other statutorily granted roles include being Chairman of the Board of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and a member of both the National Security Council and the Board of the Smithsonian Institution.

Office as stepping stone to the presidency

In recent decades, the vice presidency has frequently been used to launch bids for the presidency. Of the thirteen presidential elections from 1956 to 2004, nine featured the incumbent president; the other four (1960, 1968, 1988, 2000) all featured the incumbent Vice President. Former Vice Presidents also ran, in 1984 (Walter Mondale), and in 1968 (Richard Nixon, against the incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey). The first presidential election to include neither the incumbent president nor the incumbent Vice President on a major party ticket since 1952 came in 2008 when President George W. Bush had already served two terms and Vice President Cheney chose not to run. Richard Nixon is also the only non-sitting vice president to be elected president.

Selection process

Eligibility

John Adams, the first Vice President of the United States

The Twelfth Amendment states that "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."^[10] Thus, to serve as Vice President, an individual must:

Be a natural-born U.S. citizen;
Not be younger than 35 years old; and
Have lived in the U.S. for at least 14 years.^[11]

Additionally, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits any person who, having sworn an oath to support the United States Constitution, and later rebelled against the United States, from being eligible to serve as Vice President, unless each house of the Congress has removed the disqualification by a two-thirds vote.

Under the Twenty-second Amendment, the President of the United States may not be elected to more than two terms. However, there is no similar such limitation as to how many times one can be elected Vice President. Scholars dispute whether a former President barred from election to the Presidency is also ineligible to be elected Vice President, as suggested by the Twelfth Amendment.^[12]^[13] The issue has never been tested in practice.

Also, Article I, Section 3, Clause 7 allows the Senate, upon voting to remove an impeached federal official from office, to disqualify that official from holding any federal office.

Residency limitation

While it is commonly held that the President and Vice President must be residents of different states, this is not actually the case. Nothing in the Constitution prohibits both candidates being from a single state. Instead, the limitation imposed is on the members of the Electoral College, who must cast a ballot for at least one candidate who is not from their own state.

In theory, the candidates elected could both be from one state, but the electors of that state would run the risk of denying their vice presidential candidate the absolute majority required to secure the election, even if the presidential candidate is elected. This would then place the vice presidential election in the hands of the Senate.

In practice, however, residency is rarely an issue. Parties have avoided nominating tickets containing two candidates from the same state. Further, the candidates may themselves take action to alleviate any residency conflict. For example, at the start of 2000 election Dick Cheney was a resident of Texas, where he was the CEO of Halliburton; Cheney quickly changed his residency back to Wyoming, where he had previously served as a U.S. Representative, when Texas governor and Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush asked Cheney to be his vice presidential candidate.

Nominating process

The vice presidential candidates of the major national political parties are formally selected by each party's quadrennial nominating convention, following the selection of the party's presidential candidates. The official process is identical to the one by which the presidential candidates are chosen, with delegates placing the names of candidates into nomination, followed by a ballot in which candidates must receive a majority to secure the party's nomination. In practice, the presidential nominee has considerable influence on the decision, and in the 20th century it became customary for that person to select a preferred running mate, who is then nominated and accepted by the convention. In recent years, with the presidential nomination usually being a foregone conclusion as the result of the primary process, the selection of a vice presidential candidate is often announced prior to the actual balloting for the presidential candidate, and sometimes before the beginning of the convention itself. Often, the presidential nominee will name a vice presidential candidate who will bring geographic or ideological balance to the ticket or appeal to a particular constituency. The vice presidential candidate might also be chosen on the basis of traits the presidential candidate is perceived to lack, or on the basis of name recognition. To foster party unity, popular runners-up in the presidential nomination process are commonly considered.

The ultimate goal of vice presidential candidate selection is to help and not hurt the party's chances of getting elected. An overly dynamic selection can backfire by outshining the presidential candidate. Classic examples of this came in 1988, when Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis chose experienced Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen, and 2008, when Republican candidate John McCain picked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. In other cases the selection was seen to have hurt the nominee. In 1984, Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro whose nomination became a drag on the ticket due to repeated questions about her husband's finances. Questions about Dan Quayle's experience and temperament did not help the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, but he still won. James Stockdale, the choice of third-party candidate Ross Perot in 1992, was seen as incompetent by many, but the Perot-Stockdale ticket still won about 19% of the vote.

The first presidential candidate to choose his vice presidential candidate was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940.^[14] The last not to name a vice presidential choice, leaving the matter up to the convention, was Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1956. The convention chose Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver over Massachusetts Senator (and later president) John F. Kennedy. At the tumultuous 1972 Democratic convention, presidential nominee George McGovern selected Senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate, but numerous other candidates were either nominated from the floor or received votes during the balloting. Eagleton nevertheless received a majority of the votes and the nomination.

In cases where the presidential nomination is still in doubt as the convention approaches, the campaigns for the two positions may become intertwined. In 1976, Ronald Reagan, who was trailing President Gerald R. Ford in the presidential delegate count, announced prior to the Republican National Convention that, if nominated, he would select Senator Richard Schweiker as his running mate. This move backfired to a degree, as Schweiker's relatively liberal voting record alienated many of the more conservative delegates who were considering a challenge to party delegate selection rules to improve Reagan's chances.^{[citation needed]} In the end, Ford narrowly won the presidential nomination and Reagan's selection of Schweiker became moot.

Election, oath, and tenure

A map of the United States showing the number of electoral votes allocated to each state; 270 electoral votes are required for a majority out of 538 overall.

Main article: Electoral College (United States)

Vice Presidents are elected indirectly in the United States. A number of electors, collectively known as the Electoral College, officially select the President. On Election Day, voters in each of the states and the District of Columbia cast ballots for these electors. Each state is allocated a number of electors, equal to the size of its delegation in both Houses of Congress combined. Generally, the ticket that wins the most votes in a state wins all of that state's electoral votes and thus has its slate of electors chosen to vote in the Electoral College.

The winning slate of electors meet at its state's capital on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, about six weeks after the election, to vote. They then send a record of that vote to Congress. The vote of the electors is opened by the sitting Vice President, acting in his capacity as President of the Senate and read aloud to a joint session of the incoming Congress, which was elected at the same time as the President.

Four Vice Presidents: L-R, outgoing Pres. Lyndon Johnson (the 37th Vice President), incoming Pres. Richard Nixon (36th), Everett Dirksen, Spiro Agnew incoming Vice President (39th), and the outgoing Vice President Hubert Humphrey (38th), January 20, 1969

Pursuant to the Twentieth Amendment, the Vice President's term of office begins at noon on January 20 of the year following the election. This date, known as Inauguration Day, marks the beginning of the four-year terms of both the President and Vice President.

Unlike the President, the United States Constitution does not specify an oath of office for the Vice President. Several variants of the oath have been used since 1789; the current form, which is also recited by Senators, Representatives and other government officers, has been used since 1884:

“

I, A— B—, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.^[15]

”

The term of office for Vice President is four years. While the Twenty-second Amendment generally restricts the President to two terms, there is no similar limitation on the office of Vice President, meaning an eligible person could hold the office as long as voters continued to vote for electors who in turn would renew the Vice President's tenure. A Vice President could even serve under different administrations, as George Clinton and John C. Calhoun have done.

Original election process and reform

Under the original terms of the Constitution, the electors of the Electoral College voted only for office of President rather than for both President and Vice President. Each elector was allowed to vote for two people for the top office. The person receiving the greatest number of votes (provided that such a number was a majority of electors) would be president, while the individual who received the next largest number of votes became Vice President. If no one received a majority of votes, then the House of Representatives would choose among the five highest vote-getters, with each state getting one vote. In such a case, the person who received the highest number of votes but was not chosen president would become Vice President. In the case of a tie for second, then the Senate would choose the Vice president.^[11]

The original plan, however, did not foresee the development of political parties and their adversarial role in the government. In the election of 1796, for instance, Federalist John Adams came in first, but because the Federalist electors split their second vote amongst several vice presidential candidates, Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson came second. Thus, the president and Vice President were from opposing parties. Predictably, Adams and Jefferson clashed over issues such as states' rights and foreign policy.^[16]

A greater problem occurred in the election of 1800, in which the two participating parties each had a secondary candidate they intended to elect as Vice President, but the more popular Democratic-Republican party failed to execute that plan with their electoral votes. Under the system in place at the time (Article II, Section 1, Clause 3), the electors could not differentiate between their two candidates, so the plan had been for one elector to vote for Thomas Jefferson but not for Aaron Burr, thus putting Burr in second place. This plan broke down for reasons that are disputed, and both candidates received the same number of votes. After 35 deadlocked ballots in the House of Representatives, Jefferson finally won on the 36th ballot and Burr became Vice President.^[17]

This tumultuous affair led to the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, which directed the electors to use separate ballots to vote for the president and Vice President.^[10] While this solved the problem at hand, it ultimately had the effect of lowering the prestige of the Vice Presidency, as the office was no longer for the leading challenger for the presidency.

The separate ballots for President and Vice President became something of a moot issue later in the 19th century when it became the norm for popular elections to determine a state's Electoral College delegation. Electors chosen this way are pledged to vote for a particular presidential and vice presidential candidate (offered by the same political party). So, while the Constitution says that the president and Vice President are chosen separately, in practice they are chosen together.

If no vice presidential candidate receives an Electoral College majority, then the Senate selects the Vice President, in accordance with the United States Constitution. This could in theory lead to a situation in which the incumbent Vice President - in his role as President of the Senate - would be called upon to give his tie-breaking vote for himself or his successor. The election of 1836 is the only election so far where the office of the Vice President has been decided by the Senate. During the campaign, Martin Van Buren's running mate Richard Mentor Johnson was accused of having lived with a black woman. Virginia's 23 electors, who were pledged to Van Buren and Johnson, refused to vote for Johnson (but still voted for Van Buren). The election went to the Senate, where Johnson was elected 33-17.

Salary

The Vice President's salary is the same as that of the Chief Justice of the United States and the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives which, for 2009, is set at $227,300.^[18] The salary was set by the 1989 Government Salary Reform Act which also provides for an automatic cost of living adjustment for federal employees.

The Vice President does not automatically receive a pension based on that office, but instead receives the same pension as other members of Congress based on his position as president of the Senate.^[19] The Vice President must serve a minimum of five years to qualify for a pension.^[20]

Since 1974, the official residence of the Vice President and his family has been Number One Observatory Circle, on the grounds of the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

Vacancy

John C. Calhoun was the first Vice President to resign from office.

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution allows the House of Representatives to impeach high federal officials, including the President, for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 gives the Senate the power to remove impeached officials from office, given a two-thirds vote to convict. No Vice President has ever been impeached.

Prior to ratification of the Twenty-fifth Amendment in 1967, no provision existed for filling a vacancy in the office of Vice President. As a result, the Vice Presidency was left vacant 16 times, sometimes for nearly four years, until the next ensuing election and inauguration—eight times due to the death of the sitting president, resulting in the Vice Presidents becoming President; seven times due to the death of the sitting Vice President; and once due to the resignation of Vice President John C. Calhoun to become a senator.

Calhoun resigned because he had been dropped from the ticket by President Andrew Jackson in favor of Martin Van Buren. Already a lame duck Vice President, he was elected to the Senate by the South Carolina state legislature and resigned the Vice Presidency early to begin his Senate term because he believed he would have more power as a senator.

Since the adoption of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, the office has been vacant twice while awaiting confirmation of the new Vice President by both houses of Congress. The first such instance occurred in 1973 following the resignation of Spiro Agnew as Richard Nixon's vice president. Gerald Ford was subsequently nominated by President Nixon and confirmed by Congress. The second occurred 10 months later when Nixon resigned following the Watergate scandal and Ford assumed the presidency. The resulting Vice Presidential vacancy was filled by Nelson Rockefeller. Ford and Rockefeller are the only two people to have served as Vice President without having been elected to the office.

Once the election is over, the Vice President's usefulness is over. He's like the second stage of a rocket. He's damn important going into orbit, but he's always thrown off to burn up in the atmosphere.

– An aide to Vice President Hubert Humphrey quoted by Light 1984 cited in Sigelman and Wahlbeck 1997^[14]

The Twenty-fifth Amendment also made provisions for a replacement in the event that the Vice President died in office, resigned, or succeeded to the presidency. The original Constitution had no provision for selecting such a replacement, so the office of Vice President would remain vacant until the beginning of the next presidential and vice presidential terms. This issue had arisen most recently with the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and was rectified by Section 2 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment.

Growth of the office

Harry Truman had been Vice President only three months when he became president; he was never informed of Franklin Roosevelt's war and postwar policies while Vice President.

For more details on this topic, see Office of the Vice President of the United States.

For much of its existence, the office of Vice President was seen as little more than a minor position. John Adams, the first Vice President, described it as "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." Thomas R. Marshall, the 28th Vice President, lamented: "Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea; the other was elected Vice President of the United States. And nothing was heard of either of them again."^[21] When the Whig Party was looking for a Vice President on Zachary Taylor's ticket, they approached Daniel Webster, who said of the offer, "I do not propose to be buried until I am really dead and in my coffin."^[22] This was the second time Webster declined the office; first being offered it by William Henry Harrison. Ironically, both of the Presidents making the offer to Webster died in office, meaning he could have been President if he had accepted either one. But since Presidents rarely died in office, the natural stepping-stone to the Presidency was considered to be the office of Secretary of State.

For many years, the Vice President was given few responsibilities. After John Adams attended a meeting of the president's Cabinet in 1791, no Vice President did so again until Thomas Marshall stood in for President Woodrow Wilson while he traveled to Europe in 1918 and 1919.^{[citation needed]} Marshall's successor, Calvin Coolidge, was invited to meetings by President Warren G. Harding. The next Vice President, Charles G. Dawes, did not seek to attend Cabinet meetings under President Coolidge, declaring that "the precedent might prove injurious to the country."^[23] Vice President Charles Curtis was also precluded from attending by President Herbert Hoover.

Garret Hobart, the first Vice President under William McKinley, was one of the very few Vice Presidents at this time who played an important role in the administration. A close confidant and adviser of the President, Hobart was called Assistant President.^[24]

In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the stature of the office by renewing the practice of inviting the Vice President to cabinet meetings, which has been maintained by every president since. Roosevelt's first Vice President, John Nance Garner, broke with him at the start of the second term on the Court-packing issue and became Roosevelt's leading political enemy. Garner's successor, Henry Wallace, was given major responsibilities during the war, but he moved further to the left than the Democratic Party and the rest of the Roosevelt administration and was relieved of actual power. Roosevelt kept his last Vice President, Harry Truman, uninformed on all war and postwar issues, such as the atomic bomb, leading Truman to wryly remark that the job of the Vice President is to "go to weddings and funerals." Following Roosevelt's death and Truman's ascension to the presidency, the need to keep Vice Presidents informed on national security issues became clear, and Congress made the Vice President one of four statutory members of the National Security Council in 1949.

Vice President Dick Cheney met with Vice President-elect Joe Biden at Number One Observatory Circle on November 13, 2008, representing a transition between vice presidencies.

Richard Nixon reinvented the office of Vice President. He had the attention of the media and the Republican party, when Dwight Eisenhower ordered him to preside at Cabinet meetings in his absence. Nixon was also the first Vice President to temporarily assume control of the executive branch, which he did after Eisenhower suffered a heart attack on September 24, 1955, ileitis in June 1956, and a stroke in November 1957. President Jimmy Carter was the first president to formally give his Vice President, Walter Mondale, an office in the West Wing of the White House.

Living former Vice Presidents

Five former Vice Presidents are still living:

Walter Mondale
(with Jimmy Carter)

George H. W. Bush
(with Ronald Reagan)

Dan Quayle
(with George H. W. Bush)

Al Gore
(with Bill Clinton)

Dick Cheney
(with George W. Bush)

Bush was elected President, while Mondale and Gore were nominees of the Democratic Party who failed to become President. Quayle briefly sought the Republican nomination after leaving the Vice Presidency. Cheney had previously explored the possibility of running for President before serving as Vice President, but chose not to run for President after his two terms as Vice President.

While former Vice Presidents are eligible for pensions, they are not entitled to Secret Service personal protection.^[25] However, former Vice Presidents traditionally receive Secret Service protection for up to six months after leaving office, by presidential fiat.^[26] As of June 2008, a bill entitled the "Former Vice President Protection Act of 2008" had passed in the House of Representatives.^[27] Still needing Senate consideration, the bill would provide six-month Secret Service protection by law to a former Vice President and family.

Former Democratic Vice Presidents are ex officio superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention.

References

^ ^a ^b Goldstein, Joel K. (1995). "The New Constitutional Vice Presidency". Wake Forest Law Review (Winston Salem, NC: Wake Forest Law Review Association, Inc.) 30: 505.
^ Reynolds, Glenn Harlan (2007). "Is Dick Cheney Unconstitutional?". Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy (Chicago: Northwestern University School of Law) 102: 110.
^ ^a ^b Garvey, Todd (2008). "A Constitutional Anomaly: Safeguarding Confidential National Security Information Within the Enigma That Is the American Vice Presidency". William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal (Williamsburg: Publications Council of the College of William and Mary) 17: 565.
^ Subhawong, Aryn (2008). "A Realistic Look at the Vice Presidency: Why Dick Cheney Is An "Entity Within the Executive Branch"". Saint Louis University Law Journal (Saint Louis: Saint Louis University School of Law) 53: 281.
^ ^a ^b Albert, Richard (2005). "The Evolving Vice Presidency". Temple Law Review (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education) 78: 811, at 816–19.
^ "President Dawes," Time Magazine, 1924-12-14.
^ 3 U.S.C. § 15
^ St. Petersburg Times, January 7, 1969, p.6-A
^ "John Nance Garner quotes". http://thinkexist.com/quotation/the_vice-presidency_isn-t_worth_a_pitcher_of_warm/196103.html. Retrieved 2008-08-25.
^ ^a ^b "U.S. Const., amend. XII". http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Additional_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Amendment_XII.
^ ^a ^b See: U.S. Const. art. II, §1, cl. 5; see also, U.S. Const. amend. XII, §4.
^ See: Peabody, Bruce G.; Gant, Scott E. (1999). "The Twice and Future President: Constitutional Interstices and the Twenty-Second Amendment". Minnesota Law Review (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Law Review) 83: 565.
^ See: Albert, Richard (2005). "The Evolving Vice Presidency". Temple Law Review (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education) 78: 811, at 856-59.
^ ^a ^b http://www.jstor.org/pss/2952169
^ See: 5 U.S.C. § 3331; see also: Standing Rules of the Senate: Rule III
^ Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996. Official website of the National Archives. (July 30, 2005).
^ Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996. Official website of the National Archives. (July 30, 2005).
^ "Current salary information". Usgovinfo.about.com. http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa011600a.htm. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
^ http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/RL30631.pdf
^ Emily Yoffe (2001-01-03). "Pension information". Slate.com. http://www.slate.com/id/1006798/. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
^ "A heartbeat away from the presidency: vice presidential trivia". Case Western Reserve University. 2004-10-04. http://www.case.edu/news/2004/10-04/vp_trivia.htm. Retrieved 2008-09-12.
^ Binkley, Wilfred Ellsworth; Moos, Malcolm Charles (1949). A Grammar of American Politics: The National Government. New York. p. 265. http://books.google.com/books?id=FVSFAAAAMAAJ&q=%22I+do+not+propose+to+be+buried+until+I+am+really+dead+and+in+my+coffin.%22.
^ "U.S. Senate Web page on Charles G. Dawes, 30th Vice President (1925-1929)". Senate.gov. http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/VP_Charles_Dawes.htm. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
^ "Garret Hobart". http://www.historycentral.com/Bio/rec/GarretHobart.html. Retrieved 2008-08-25.
^ "Internet Public Library: FARQs". http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/pensionFARQ.html. Retrieved 2008-08-25.
^ "CNN.com". http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0211/19/lkl.00.html. Retrieved 2008-08-25.
^ "Former Vice President Protection Act of 2008". Opencongress.org. http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h5938/show. Retrieved 2009-08-09.

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