An informative essay by Josh Chafetz on the Constitutonal role of the VP:
But the thing is, our Founding Fathers created a system in which the vice presidency went to the Electoral College runner-up. And even though they didn't anticipate the role that political parties would come to play, they knew enough to understand that this meant that the president and vice president might well be rivals. As a result, the Constitution gives the vice president no executive role at all, other than waiting for the president to die, resign, or become incapacitated. Indeed, John Adams, our first vice president, wrote to Abigail that "[m]y country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." The Founders didn't think that the executive role of the vice president would be flexible; they thought it would be almost non-existent.
Biden, however, kept mangling away. "The Constitution is explicit," he said. "The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote." Well, not exactly. The vice president is always the president of the Senate--indeed, since the vice president was expected to have so little an executive role, presiding over the Senate was meant to be his day job. As Roger Sherman put it at the Philadelphia Convention, "If the vice president were not to be President of the Senate, he would be without employment." Biden was therefore right to note that the vice president's Senate vote is limited to breaking ties, but wrong to think that this constituted the entirety of his responsibilities with respect to Congress.
This was also a funny line: "Skipping over Biden's assertion that Cheney 'has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history' (a bit of hyperbole is forgivable in the midst of a campaign, but is Cheney really worse than, say, the dueling and possibly treasonous Burr?)...."
Yes. Burr had the decency to leave after a single term.
Biden from the transcript:
There is no constitutional reason that the Senate could not follow the style of house and imbue the presiding officer will control of the agenda for instance. The one interesting question is whether the Senate could create a "Speaker of the Senate" independent from the vice-president. I would expect this is constitutionally suspect but know of no discussion of it.
BTW, I would love to have a job where my main responsibility is to wake up each morning and ask if the President is OK.
Article I does say that the Senate shall elect a president pro tem to serve in the absence of the vice president, in almost identical words as it says that the House shall elect a Speaker. So it makes sense that each house would be responsive to its elected leader even though someone else was its leader ex officio. The last time anyone said that an ex-senator vice president would retain influence in the Senate was in the Lyndon Johnson era, and he quickly learned that his once great power had passed on.
Cheney really is worse than Burr. He organized a government within the government, reaching into the Justice and Defense Departments, bypassing normal channels within those departments and excluding the designated authorities such as the NSC and JAGs, with horrible consequences for civil liberties at home and the battlefields abroad. We would have been much better off had Colin Powell challenged Cheney to a duel; Cheney would have hit the second, but Powell would have put him away.
There has also been quite a bit of commentary as to whether it was constitutionally permissible to grant Cheney authority over specific portfolios.
All of this was promptly forgotten it seems once Palin made the same argument. It reminds me of something from my days in student government back in college. Someone I knew was considering having himself up for a certain committee that I had been on. He asked me about it, and I told him that the committee was not very active. Well during his interview, he was asked whether he had time for the committee. He repeated some of what I said. Needless to say the selection committee was not very happy with his answer...
Hamilton didn't apologize to Burr after Hamilton was shot.
As I recall, Cheney first invoked his legislative role to evade the requirements of an executive order dealing with National Archives oversight of the executive's classification of documents. The documents in question did not come to Cheney in his capacity as a member of the legislative branch. He functions as a member of the executive, and that's why he had the documents and why he was able to make decisions about whether they should be classified.
If he were a champion of extending the same level of access and control to other members of the legislative branch, perhaps we would have had a real debate about the VP's role a year or two ago.
This is not to defend the accuracy of Biden's statements. But, when one hears a Republican VP candidate emphasize her legislative role after already describing the active role she will play in the executive branch, it is difficult not to think of Cheney and his strained relationship with the rule of law.
btw ~ do you really think the extreme secrecy of our executive branch is not dangerous?
Burr did not help start a war based on false intelligence. He did not assert that he and the President did not have to obey the law, he did not hold secret meetings with the oil industry to set energy policy, and he did not abandon basic conservative principles to help concentrate extraordinary and in many case unconstitutional powers to the executive branch. Ok, Chaney only wounded a guy, while Burr killed Hamilton, so I guess that's one for Chaney.
FDR, with no shortage of patience for "Uncle Joe" Stalin himself, dumped Vice President Wallace from the Democratic ticket in 1944 - in part based on his disturbingly Russophilic viewpoint and pinkish opinions on other issues. Those concerns turned out to be justified as Wallace's positions became clearer during his run for the White House in 1948 on the Progressive ticket. That was a watershed election for the Democrats. Given the choice between containing Communism and appeasing it, they chose the former. One can only imagine the vastly different landscape of the early post-war years and the ripple effects of them later in time had the nation been led by President Wallace and not the more resolute President Truman after 1945. Give FDR credit for some prescience.
Incidentally, Wallace, for his part, was shocked back into reality by Soviet sponsored aggression in Korea, declared himself anti-Communist, published an apologia, supported Eisenhower's candidacy in 1952 and even Richard Nixon's in 1960!
That title belongs to Burr (Though see the next paragraph.).
John Calhoun seems to have been insane by the time he was veep. At least that's the most generous interpretation I can come up with for his flirtations with treason. So let's say he's worst veep number 1.5.
Charles Dawes might be number two on that list. (From my native Chicago, and in fact my birthplace--Evanston.) And perhaps Schuyler Colfax is up there, too. (From my longtime home of South Bend, IN. I'm beginning to sense a trend.)
Spiro Agnew? A distant third. (HA! I've never lived in Maryland. And I'm not Greek. And not called Ted.) Tied with Henry Wallace, who never noticed how popular he was with the American Muscovites.
"Miss Incongeniality Award" to John Nance Garner, who sought to do as much damage to his president's policies as did Dawes. But he was thwarted by a political genius, and a world war.
Okay, this isn't technically untrue, but I believe it is misleading. The development of political parties made it less likely for the President and VP to be ideological opponents under the original system. The big pre-12th Amendment mishaps were:
(a) Adams and Jefferson elected together, even though they were ideological opponents (before the formal party system) and
(b) Jefferson and Barr (ideological allies) getting a tie vote, even though everyone knew Jefferson was leading the ticket. All the Democratic-Republican electors were loyal to both, thus the tie vote. (The Federalists saw this coming and made sure to have one of their electors vote for Adams &Jay instead of Adams &Pinckney.)
It's tie votes, not "Pres and Veep can't stand each other", that were the problem with the two-votes-for-President clause in the original system.
Next, I'd like to ditto what Paul Allen said. Good points, and there are good political arguments for executive control of legislative agendas (although of course there are good arguments against same). The Senate's President pro tem isn't much like a Speaker because of the tradition giving the former office to the most senior (not necessarily most influential or most spritely!) Senator of the majority party.
Evidence for close Presidential-Senatorial cooperation: "advice and consent". They must have meant something by "advice", right? What's to prevent them from rejecting any appointee they haven't hand-picked? And with only 26 people in the original Senate, they're not much bigger than a lot of cabinets, and none of them were directly elected. So, rigid separation of executive and legislature are a matter of convention, not Constitutional marching orders.
And finally, I must respond to:
"The Vice President has no official executive duties, but the President can have anyone he wants to work for him in exercising his executive duties, including the Vice-President."
"Official" surely doesn't equal Constitutional? The Vice President sits on both the National Security Council and the Smithsonian board by statute ... seems official enough to me. I do think Cheney draws too much attention, and I'm wholly in favor of the VP being up to speed on national security at all times.
In fact, I think presiding over the Senate and sitting on the tiny (by Washington standards) and important NSC are quite enough responsibility. It's really important for the President to hear the opinion of someone he can't fire when it comes to National Security.
You comment, "Biden is a moron."
But you neglected to mention that he's also been caught once at plagiarism. The difference is that no one has a choice about being born a moron.