The Vice Presidency

Ever wonder what the VP actually does? Well, you're not alone. Many of the ambitious people that end up in this #2 spot are left with little to do. But are there reasons to change that? Brad and Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky explore the history and powers of the Vice Presidency and then ask how the institution could be reformed. 

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Transcript

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Intro 

Hi, I’m Brad Fallon and you’re listening to Why and Why Not, the show where we take a look at how the American government got to be what it is, and ask ourselves: why not make some changes? Let’s dig in. 

Cold Open

In January of 1899, a force of nature burst into the Executive Mansion in Albany, New York. This forces name: Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had just recently returned home from the Spanish-American War where he led the Rough Riders and was dubbed “the Hero of San Juan Hill”. Now home in New York as a popular war hero, he decided to make a run for Governor of his state. 

New York Republican Party Boss Thomas Platt saw the popularity of Roosevelt as an opportunity to keep a Republican as Governor and so he threw the full weight of his political machine behind the candidacy. Teddy ultimately won the race by just a few thousand votes. This victory was almost certainly delivered by Platt’s machine and the party boss felt that this would give him real influence over the new Governor. 

But of course we’re talking about Theodore Roosevelt here and he didn’t really answer to anybody. So while Platt expected Governor Roosevelet to make high-level appointments at his direction, Roosevelt refused and the relationship between the two began to sour. This all finally came to head when Teddy supported a bill to tax certain corporations in a new way. This lifted the curtain and revealed to these corporations that the money they were giving to Platt’s machine provided them with little to no influence over the Governor. 

Platt realized that if he wanted to keep his machine alive, he needed to get the progressive Roosevelt out of Albany. So ahead of the 1900 Republican National Convention, Platt conspired with President McKinley’s campaign to rig the vote and ensure that Roosevelt would be nominated as Vice President. In Platt’s eyes, Roosevelt would have little influence as VP and kicking him upwards into national politics was the best way to stop the changes he was making. 

And, to Platt’s credit, it worked. Roosevelt had little influence as VP and is actually quoted as saying "I would a great deal rather be anything than vice president." But in September of 1901, something the party establishment hadn’t planned for happened. President McKinley was shot and killed and in the words of McKinley’s political mastermind Mark Hanna, “That Damn Cowboy” became President of the United States. 

In the history of Roosevelt, the Vice Presidency is often mentioned as a simple stepping stone between Governor and the Presidency. But this is the second-highest ranking office in our nation’s government. Why did the Republican bosses think this was the place where Roosevelt could be the least impactful? And what does the Vice President do anyway?

On this episode of Why and Why Not we’re digging into the Vice Presidency. 

Intro to the Vice Presidency

Despite being the second-highest ranking office in our nation, the Vice Presidency is something that is often mocked. 

We’re talking about the office that the very first occupant, John Adams, called “The most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

And Adams wasn’t alone in this. John Nance Garner who served as VP under Franklin Roosevelt famously said “the vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit.”

But the award really goes to Selina Meyers, the fictional Vice President from HBO’s Veep: 

[VEEP]

*Laugh* She's so much more eloquent than John Adams. And clearly the high level of visibility that the office provides makes it significant. It’s a big deal that at the time of this recording we have a woman of color as VP. But  doI think it’s worth pondering why this high-ranking office is regarded as so inconsequential. I mean, what does the vice president actually do? To find some answers here, we have to go all the way back to the beginning. 

Why

The creation of the Vice Presidency is a great example of the states acting as laboratories of democracy. That’s because the Articles of Confederation didn’t have a VP. But when the framers went back to the drawing board to write the Constitution, they looked at what was working well in the states. And somes states had Lieutenant Governors to serve as a sort-of backup Governor. The founding fathers saw some wisdom in this.

[Successor to the President]

That’s Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky. She’s the author of “The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution” and is an all-around expert on the executive branch. And what she says here makes a lot of sense, the founding fathers were starting a democratic experiment and this role allowed for a simple succession process in case a president died. And seeing as how the medicines of the day included lead, mercury, and arsenic - it was a good idea to have a plan in place. 

So the framers included the role of Vice President in the Constitution. But they didn;t go into much detail. 

[Constitutional Duties] 

And it may sound weird that the vice president can cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. But this came about because, constitutionally, the Vice President is the President of the US Senate. This was another idea borrowed from states like New York where the Lieutenant Governor was the President of their State Senate. But unlike the Speaker of the US House who serves as the Presiding Officer of the body and is very powerful, the VP served primarily as an administrator who kept debates and Senate work going smoothly. 

And, look, it wasn’t necessarily abnormal for the Constitution to provide only vague direction as to how offices should be carried out. It’s why we today credit George Washington for setting so much of the precedence that defines the Presidency. And as the first Vice President, John Adams did the same. 

[First JA Precedent] 

And while I think many people would love a lofty job where your primary duties include existing and going to dinners, most people who ascend to the vice presidency are ambitious and being so close to power but so un-influential must drive them crazy. And that is certainly how Adams felt. 

[Hated the Vice Presidency]

But, to be fair, John Adams did do more than breathe and eat. In fact, he cast more tie-breaking votes than any other Vice President thus far and set the standard that the Vice President voting could become a somewhat routine thing to happen. 

Now there is another mention of the VP in the Constitution that has nothing to do with the roles of the office, but rather how they’re selected. And it is far different than how it’s done today. Unlike the presidency which Americans can run for directly, the Constitution set up a different model for VPs. Under the original, unamended Constitution, whoever received the most Electoral College votes would become President. This obviously hasn’t changed. But back then, the second-place candidate became Vice President. 

And honestly that;s hard to even imagine today. I mean under the original model, Trump would be Biden’s Vice President at the time of this recording. And while I do find the thought of that pretty amusing, it does open the door to serious problems. For one, this almost ensures that a political rival to the President becomes VP. And any dysfunction aside, this creates real incentive for the VP to conspire to have the President assassinated, or impeached, or otherwise corrupted. 

And this is a place where I honestly just don’t know that the framers were thinking. They created a system where an ambitious person would be put into a do-nothing job and have the most powerful office in the land separated from them only by the heartbeat of a rival politician. You don’t have to be Frank Underwood to see how this could play out. 

But the other problem was that there was no way to distinguish Electoral Votes as for President or for Vice President. So you would essentially have each party’s Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees competing with each other for the top job. And in 1800, that’s exactly what happened. 

[1800]

So yeah, it’s pretty crazy that the person who was clearly supposed to be elected as Vice President would try to snake their way into the top job on a technicality. But we’re talking about ambitious politicians here and some stereotypes ring true. But just imagine if you’d cast a vote for Obama in 2008 and ended up with President Biden instead. 

Since Jefferson and Burr were both Democratic-Republicans, there was no simple, party-line way for Congress to vote a winner. In the end, it took 36 ballots for Jefferson to be selected as President and Burr as Vice President. 

And now these two people who just had the mother of all falling outs in front of the whole country had to serve together. 

[12th Amendment]

And this patched up a pretty glaring hole in the system. But this wasn’t the only change in how we select the Vice President that happened at this time. With the rise of parties in early America came nominations for President and Vice President. But this was in the era before primary elections so each party’s congressional delegation simply picked nominees for President and Vice President. I’ll go into more detail on this in an episode about how we nominate presidential candidates, but the important thing to know for this episode is that Presidential nominees often had little say as to who their VP would be. Rather, it was a party decision. Party members would take into consideration things like how to balance out a ticket (often geographically), who had been loyal to the party and deserved an award, and things like that. 

Overtime, this shifted to be a broader party decision so that the Legislative branch wasn’t able to have such influence on who occupied the top job. But this led to the rise of power brokers and party bosses exerting significant control over the nominating process and all sorts of backroom deals were made to install people in our highest ranking offices. But still, the presidential nominees had little say in who their ticket mate would be. 

This may have been part of why presidents and vice presidents didn’t necessarily see themselves partners. And once in office, they had pretty different jobs. As I mentioned earlier, the VP spent a considerable amount of time presiding over the Senate. A considerable number of farmers and early American leaders thought that if the VP was heavily involved in both executive branch and legislative matters that it would violate the concept of separation of powers. So the vice presidency was primarily a legislative role for the first roughly 150 years of the country. 

But again, since the Constitution is vague about the Veep’s actual duties, this varied dramatically depending on who occupied the office. John Adams was very active in the Senate. He lobbied Senators on legislation and and frequently lectured senators on procedure. Thomas Jefferson was less involved in individual matters and rather spent his 4 years as VP writing the Manual of Parliamentary Practice to help future VPs preside over the Senate. 

Other VPs including Calhoun, Dallas, and Morton became masters of the senate rules and precedents and used them to influence debates. But still others didn’t become involved with the Senate much at all. Ulysses S. Grant’s vice president, Henry Wilson, spent his time on office writing a three-volume history of the opposition to slavery. 

And while this variance in duties caused the VP to be somewhat obscure for much of American history, an incredibly important assasination caused the country to reconsider who should occupy the job. 

In his second term, Lincol selected Tennessee native and Democrat Andrew Johnson to be his Vice. This was an important signal that the country could become whole again following the Civil War. But when Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth and Johnson took over as President, the country had to grapple with the dramatic change in leadership. 

[Andrew Johnson]

So people started considering whether the VP would be ready to take over as President if tragedy struck. And it wasn;t until the 20th century that the Vice Presidency changed significantly again. 

In 1920 Warren Harding had been elected president and Calvin Coolidge ascended to the Vice Presidency. But Harding was probably too busy being Washington’s most powerful playboy to stick the status quo and he started inviting Coolidge to cabinet meetings. This really began the shift towards the VP becoming a more active member in the executive branch. 

By the mid-1950s, the Vice President had completely stopped presiding over the senate as a normal part of the duties. And increasingly the office became one of a presidential adviser who would be appointed to run projects or represent the president to foreign heads of state and other important figures. But it’s not exactly like this was a simple switch to being more influential. 

[Mondale and Cheney] 

But along with seeing the VP as more of a partner came Presidential nominees having more influence over the selection process. And this developed from the party nominating someone at the convention to the presidential nominee announcing their pick ahead of time like what we have today. 

And as Dr. Chervinsky said, we can look to VPs like Cheney and see that he had real influence in the administration and took on some of the duties of the presidency as assigned by his boss. Cheney is often considered to have been essentially the co-president who made significant foreign policy decisions. Walter Modale started the tradition of having weekly lunches with the President and Lyndon Johnson was the first VP to have an office in the Executive Office Building. When Spiro Agnew became the vice with Nixon’s election, the President gave the VP an office in the White House for the first time and allowed them to weigh in heavily on policy decisions. 

The power of the office probably peaked with Cheney thus far but Biden was always the last person in the room when Obama made significant decisions. However, this did change when Mike Pence became Donald Trump’s VP. But, interestingly, Pence did show just how important the office could be. 

[Mike Pence] 

Dr. Chervinsky is of course referring to the actions Pence took on January 6th. Ahead of the certification of the Electoral College votes, Donald Trump called on Pence to reject ballots in certain states that Trump had lost. This would have resulted in neither Biden nor Trump receiving the majority of electoral votes and the election would have been thrown to the House of Representatives to pick who the next president would be. 

The Democrats controlled the House of Representatives at this time but that wouldn’t have mattered. You see, when the House selects the President each state’s delegation gets a vote. And since Republicans controlled a majority of state delegations and a majority of Republicans had already voted to reject the electoral college votes, this would have almost ensured that Donald Trump would remain President despite losing to Joe Biden. 

All of this could have happened. Pence could have thrown out the election and remained in power himself. But he refused. This prompted Trump supporters to storm the Capitol and try to stop the certification of votes while Trump himself tweeted quote “Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution”. 

To be honest with you, I don’t have a lot of good things to say about Mike Pence. But the man did hold up his oath to office and prevented a coup on January 6th. This wasn’t just a profile in courage for him but demonstrated just how important the vice presidency can be. Our whole system of government came down to the Vice Presidency and he rose to the occasion. 

Today, Kamala Harris seems to be fitting back into Biden’s role as VP. She’s an adviser and reportedly always the last person in the room before a big decision is made. And she’s the successor of an office that has changed significantly over time and she’ll almost certainly leave her own mark on it. 

But this is Why and Why Not. And we have to ask whether this role should be changed to better serve the country. We’ll dig into what that could look like, right after the break. 

Why Not

Welcome back to Why and Why Not! 

Before the break we took a look at how the vice presidency was shaped up overtime. And the bottom line is that the responsibilities of this office are somewhat vague and the candidates are selected by each party's presidential nominees fairly independently. And I think it’s worth asking whether we should make some changes. First in regards to the duties and second in regards to the election. 

So how could we change the duties? Here’s Dr. Chervinsky on one idea. 

[Executive branch VP] 

And this could make sense. We could require that the Vice President is a governing partner and actually split some roles off of the Presidency. I mean the President is required to run the military, lead Congress, prepare for natural disasters, steer the economy, and manage foriegn relations all before lunch. We’re kidding ourselves if we act like one person can really do all of this. So  instead of handing it off to staff and political appointmees maybe it makes sense to give some of these duties to the VP. 

However, it’s hard to imagine what this would look like if the VP could be the final decision -maker on issues that the President may have an interest in. So we’d want to make sure that the Veep is still secondary to the President. 

But there’s another model that is closer to the founding fathers’ original idea for the office. 

[Prime Minister VP] 

And there are roadmaps to see how this could work. In states like Texas the Lieutenant Governor controls the work of the State Senate. This would provide frequent leadership changes in the Senate and could allow the people to vote as a nation in a single election to choose the direction of Congress. We know that Congressional leadership is incredibly powerful but currently the people have no direct say in who becomes the Speaker of the House or Majority Leader of the Senate. 

Of course, if the whole point of making the VP head of the Senate is to bolster the voice of the people, the current selection process wouldn’t really work. Think about how we currently elect the vice president. The party nominee picks their candidate and then we vote in the General election. But how often are people really voting for Vice President rather than the person at the top of the ticket? I think reason will tell you that it’s not often. 

So electing the head of the Senate through what is essentially an appointment by the executive would likely violate separation of powers and not really give the people more of a voice in choosing congressional leadership. 

For this to work, we’d likely need to elect the Vice President completely separately from the President. Here’s Dr. Chervinsky. 

[Separate Election]

And this is a really interesting idea in my opinion. Imagine how much it would change the responsiveness of our government to the people if we got a direct say on the leadership in both the executive and legislative branches. If a President and Vice President were elected with an overlapping agenda, you would have to call that a real mandate by the people and pressure to make change would be immense. We would also have seasoned legislators who aspire to be the head of the Senate making their case to and building their support among the American people rather than to the members of their party’s senate caucus.

However, as Dr. Chervinsky said, we would run the risk of the VP and President being rivals and this could potentially create incentive for the VP to conspire to impeach or even assassinate the President so that they could take over in the top job. And this could also lead to the Senate leader being of a different party than the majority of senators. And at that point it’s unclear whether the members would actually listen to their leader. 

Personally, I think we’ve seen this tested in states where the Governor and Lieutenant Governor are elected separately but of course the federal government comes with a lot more power and so it's hard to know what would happen. 

But, of course, if we don’t want the VP to fulfill this Senate President role, it may not make sense to elect them separately. 

[Nomination of the VP]

In this case, the last thing we would want is a President and VP as rivals since it would hinder work from getting done. It actually seems that we could adopt this model without any changes to how we select VPs today. 

But in all, I think these are changes worth considering. In my view, there is something lost by having such a high-ranking official be so un-influential in our government. I mean why even have the role and not simply replace the President with, say, the Secretary of State or Speaker of the House in the event of their death? But that doesn’t mean we have to make changes. I think Dr. Chervinsky perfectly summed up the reason for thinking through this however when she said this at the end of our interview. 

[Why and Why Not Question] 

And yeah, there’s no way I could have said that so eloquently but I completely agree. 

And that’s it for this episode of Why and Why Not! What do you think about the role and selection of the Vice President? I’d love to hear from you. Let me know by leaving a review and comment on this episode or by tweeting me at bradleysfallon on Twitter! 

A special thanks to Dr. Chervinsky for agreeing to talk with me for this episode. If you want to learn more about the executive branch, I seriously recommend picking up a copy of her book The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. 

And thanks to you for giving us a lesson! Until next time, I’m Brad Fallon and this has been Why and Why Not.