The Real Veepstakes
Like everyone else in DC, I’m pondering the so-called “Veepstakes” — Evan Bayh? Joe Biden? Jack Reed? Sebelius? — except unlike a lot of people I’m having a hard time developing really strong opinions about it. Which reminds me of one pretty strongly-held opinion of mine: We should eliminate the office of the Vice Presidency.
When you think about it, it’s exceedingly odd. The Vice President has no formal role in the conduct of government to speak of. And yet, since the end of World War II the choice of VP has been very important. Not so much because the Vice President is an important person but because no many VPs go on (Truman, Nixon, Johnson, HW Bush) to become President while others (Gore, Humphrey, Mondale) become major party nominees. Consequently, even though the office is trivial, the choice is very important. But the choice is also fairly important politically to the person who does the choosing. Therefore, “would it be good for this person to become a presidential nominee” gets relatively little consideration during the decision-making process (relative to: would s/he be a good surrogate? give me a ‘bounce’? help with a state?) even though it really ought to be the primary consideration. Beyond that, you have the “Cheney Paradox.” It seems perverse to have a Vice President who doesn’t do anything. But a Vice President who does too much becomes a destabilizing influence within the government — nobody really knows who he speaks for, and he can influence things in ways that provide for no accountability.
At the end of the day, after all, the Vice President’s core job function is simply to take over the government in case the President dies. But it would be easy enough for the line of succession to simply run through the cabinet (SecState, SecDef, etc…) rather than their being a specially designated “inaugurate in case of death” figure. The original conception of the Vice Presidency was a constitutional bug that the framers hadn’t really thought through properly, and though Amendment XII works okay as a patch, it would really be better do do away with the thing entirely.
74 Responses to “The Real Veepstakes”
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August 17th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
In my opinion, the Bush administration has been and continues to be a ringing success on the measures that the administration would judge itself on, and Cheney and his friends deserve a lion’s share of the credit for that. I’m convinced that liberals would gain a great deal politically if one of their own, someone who is both liberal and politically interested in seeing liberal policies enacted by the government, essentially the mirror image of Cheney, could be installed in the Vice Presidency.
Sadly, it seems that no one who matters agrees with me.
August 17th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
But then whether or not the Secretary of State was qualified to be President would become a critical factor in their nomination fight … and plus we’d need a new tie-breaking rule in the Senate (though one Senator for DC elected to a four year term in mid-term elections would fix that, and be a lot more clout than one Representative, besides).
August 17th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
I think Jack Reed makes political sense in part because it won’t seem political, and it seems important for Obama to fight the sense that he is, in fact, a political creature. Plus he brings military experience and expertise and voted no on the Iraq War resolution. And I think Obama’d get a ton of credit for picking Reed, since it would come across (and actually be!) substantive rather than primarily political. Plus the whole regional thing is way overplayed.
So substance and politics can go hand in hand.
August 17th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Yes, this would only serve to kick the can down to choosing the Secretary of State. Do we really want the choosing of cabinet members to be more politicized than it already is?
the choice of VP has been very important. Not so much because the Vice President is an important person but because no many VPs go on (Truman, Nixon, Johnson, HW Bush) to become President while others (Gore, Humphrey, Mondale) become major party nominees.
But how do you know if becoming VP actually led them to be elected President, or if it was the same qualities that got them chosen as VP would have led them to the Presidential nomination anyway?
Obviously the succession is a launchpad that helped Truman and LBJ, but all the others were pretty legitimate political figures in their own right before becoming VP. Bush and Gore both had done well in primaries, Mondale and Nixon were very prominent Senators. There’s little that separates these candidates’ non-VP resumes from all the other presidential nominees of the recent era (Kerry, Dole, Dukakis, Reagan, Goldwater, McGovern, Stevenson).
And, of course, Dan Quayle definitively proves the VP job is not an automatic ticket to a presidential nomination.
August 17th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
The original conception of the Vice Presidency was a constitutional bug that the framers hadn’t really thought through properly,
It’s not a constitutional bug – the Framers considered various methods of dividing the executive, but no one was happy with them, so they the one they came up with had the Veep hanging around and organizing the Senate against the President. (The Veep was weak because the President and the entire executive branch was intended to be weak.) The bug was in the electoral method – when they fixed that, they killed the idea of an independent Vice-Presidency.
I be fine with the idea of the President having a President Pro-Tem able to serve as a Secretary of this or that department, but the Veep should should still be in charge of the Senate with more powers (which is acceptable if the Veep is separately elected).
Everyone complains about an overweening executive that continually abrogates more power to itself, but when they want to twiddle with the Constitution, every change favors a more powerful executive. You can’t have it both ways.
max
['I mean, we could just change the Constitution to have a Dictator-for-life. That would really streamline things!']
August 17th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I’m grudgingly in favor of keeping the VP system we have in place, because it means that the person in the immediate line of succession is someone who was chosen by the voters. Going through the cabinet creates its own set of problems, such as the nomination battles Bruce mentioned above, and the fact that the qualities to make someone a Sec. of State may not be what we want in a Vice President.
August 17th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Oops- that should read “in a President.”
August 17th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Um, why not keep the order of succession basically as it is after eliminating the Vice President? That means going through the Speaker of the House and then the new version of the office of the President of the Senate (who after the office of the Vice President was eliminated would presumably be chosen from the Senate itself) before getting to the Cabinet. By the way, that new President of the Senate would presumably become much less of ceremonial pick than is currently the case for the President pro tempore of the Senate (e.g., because of the tiebreaking power), which would actually in turn make the succession more meritocratic.
And you could also add a provision that the House would have to select a permanent replacement President within a short period to serve out the remainder of the incapacitated President’s term, or even just the remainder of the Congress if we were in the first Congress of the incapacitated President’s four-year term, with a special election to be held for the remainder of the term in such a case.
August 17th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
won’t work. our political culture today–and by that I mean the way the citizenry has learned, and now desires, to think about American politics (for better and worse)–demands that the president be elected. In the event of a VP vacancy, we’re comfortable with the president exercising her/her power of appointment. But in the event of a POTUS vacancy, the electorate is not going to be comfortable with the unelected Al Haig or Warren Christopher or Madeleine Albright or Condoleeza Rice advancing to the Presidency. That “choice” will have been a de facto one, made months or years ago by either a dead or disgraced president. This line of succession would significantly damage and destabilize the country’s confidence in the administration.
You say the Vice-President’s “core job function is simply to take over the government in case the President dies.” Yes, but we’re not talking about the person; we’re talking about the office. The “core” raison d’etre of the Office of the Vice-Presidency is to ensure the smooth and lawful transition of government at a time of crisis with the highest possible degree of confidence.
August 17th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
“the electorate is not going to be comfortable with the unelected Al Haig or Warren Christopher or Madeleine Albright or Condoleeza Rice advancing to the Presidency.”
We already had an unelected president. His name was Gerald Ford and he was appointed by Congress after his elected predecessor, Spiro Agnew, was brought down on bribery charges. Ford wasn’t much to write home about, but he hardly represented some major presidential crisis like his former boss, Nixon, did. I have no problem with keeping the VP slot partly because it lends greater legitimacy to emergency presidents and also because its a good farm system for future presidents, but I do not think the argument holds water that faith in the government will collapse because the Secretary of State assumes the presidency.
August 17th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
The idea that the vice-president is a destabilizing influence doesn’t ring true to me; there are *always* other power brokers within an administration and the question of who they speak for is always a problem. What made Cheney a disaster was that the president is a cretin and Cheney is a particular kind of genius for extra0curricular activities. You can’t come up with a structural solution to that problem, after all; having Cheney as Bush’s secretary of state or defense would be exactly the same kind of disaster, for exactly the same reason. The solution is to have an executive who actually is one, and the reason Bush isn’t one has little to do with the office of the VP per se.
August 17th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
By the way, I agree with zz. The truth is that the Vice-President has almost no power outside of what the President grants the Vice-President. So, whatever problems Cheney has caused happened only because Bush allowed him to cause those problems.
August 17th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
As uncompelling as the case might be to retain the VP, you certainly haven’t made compelling case to get rid of the office.
If nothing else, I like the idea that the would be successor was actually elected to office, even if only marginally so as the weaker member of a ticket. You know, Democracy and all that.
As as a read above notes, the appointment of the would be successor would become a political nightmare, and a conspiracy theorist dream.
If this is the best case for doing away with VP, might as well keep it,…
August 17th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I wouldn’t mind keeping the vice presidency, but I wish we could change the name of the office. The problem is that “vice president” in a corporate environment uniformly refers to an assistant president, a subordinate president, a number two, and executive with high responsibilities in the chain of command just beneath the president. This has lead millions of Americans into thinking that the Vice President of the United States has important constitutional responsibilities placing him second in the chain of command in the executive branch. But apart from his only very occasionally important role as president of the Senate, the Vice President of the United States has no constitutional role other than to sit around and be ready in case something happens to the president. Rather than call him the “vice president”, it would be better to call him the “presidential understudy” or “emergency back-up president” or “taxi-squad president” something like that.
As far as the candidates for VP go, I also don’t have a lot of strong feelings about the most frequently mentioned candidates – except for the detestable Evan Bayh. Bayh wasn’t just one of the hapless, miscalculating Democratic saps who voted for the Iraq war. He was one of the true ringleaders of the war drive: one of authors and co-sponsors of the Senate version of war resolution, and a close associate of McCain, Lieberman, and Graham. He was very active in the February, 2003 war propaganda effort, signing on as co-chair to Randy Scheunemann’s Committee for the Liberation of Iraq to give the war drive a PR boost on the day after the Blix report and the day before the global Iraq protests. (Yes, that’s the same Randy Scheunemann who is McCain’s top foreign policy guy, and who has been driving McCain’s neo-Cold War Georgia recklessness during the past two weeks.) Bayh is really a necon trojan horse in the Democratic camp. He’s a bona fide Lieberdem, a card-carrying fellow traveler of the neoconservatives, and about as far right as they get in the Democratic Party on foreign policy. He was also one of three right-wing Dems, along with Zell Miller and Ben Nelson, to vote for the Senate version of Bush’s 2003 tax bill, which passed 51-49, although he later voted against the conference version. Finally, he was not just a DLC member and camp follower, but one of its true leaders – the golden boy of the Democratic right.
My reading is that Bayh saw his father lose to Dan Quayle, and since then has harbored a secret longing to be a Republican. Though a Hillary Clinton backer, he’s substantially to the right of Clinton on foreign policy. It is nothing short of shocking that his name is coming up. If he gets the nod, after all that has happened in the past seven years, it would be proof of utter the impotence and imbecility of Democrats in resisting the zany right in the foreign policy realm.
August 17th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Dan:
Ford was appointed by Nixon, and confirmed by Congress. It’s true Congress basically gave Nixon no choice but to choose Ford, but that was Nixon’s choice to seek advice from Congressional leadership. For all offices other than President, the public will generally accept any Presidential appointment that Congress also accepts. Even if the President doing the appointing turns out to have been a crook.
August 17th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Cheney as Bush’s secretary of state or defense would be exactly the same kind of disaster, for exactly the same reason.
I disagree with this, and rather strongly. Cabinet secretaries have statutory responsibilities that militate against running around the government banging heads to do the President’s will, not least because Congressional scrutiny or the threat of it is greater at the cabinet level because all sorts of underlings who could testify against you exist, the departments have built-in self-policing apparatus and are simply more subservient to the enforced strictures of modern rational bureaucracy. Because it lacks a large cadre, the Vice Presidency has often been weaker than any department, but Cheney has shown us that it can be unleashed to great effect.
I also do not subscribe to the point of view that Cheney has been so effective because Bush is ineffective. I think history, not just American history, shows that the benign Head of State plus powerful, aggressive Prime Minister model is the most politically successful of any. Cheney and Bush are not phenomena that make any sense without the other.
August 17th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Marshall,
But Cheney could have been Bush’s Chief of Staff, say, and played the same role.
August 17th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
We are extremely fortunate in the few times we have lost a sitting President not to have had a major succession crisis. We would be wise at this point not to mess around with a method of emergency succession that has precedent and tradition behind it. At the time a President dies is one of the last times that we ought to be experimenting with constitutional innovation for its own sake.
August 17th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
My usual take in these constitutional matters is to look at France. France is a large country where the President is more than a figurehead, but they organized their republic later than we did and avoided many of our mistakes.
The French manage to elect their president, using universal suffrage, without an Electoral College, and they also have dealt with presidential deaths and disabilities -a number of French presidents have died in office or resigned- without a vice president. The Electoral College and the Vice President are devices that only eighteenth century intellectuals could have come up with and it would be best to be rid of them.
As it happens, we already have provisions in the Constitution, and supplementary federal legislation, dealing with the failure to elect a president, as well as presidential death or disability when there is no vice president. I don’t see the problem with having either the Speaker of the House or whoever the Senate selects as its presiding officer serve as interim president, until the House choses a new president to serve out the term. In fact, no consitutional amendment may be necessary, it might just take a presidential candidate refusing to select a Vice President, and his electors and the Senate following suit.
We have been lucky in that most of the Vice Presidents who had to take office as President in mid-term have turned out well, however the one disasterous exception (Andrew Johnson) indicates that, well we’ve been very lucky.
August 17th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Darn, I was hoping Jack Reed would turn out to be the author of Ten Days That Shook the World. But anyhow, I always find blogs on ideal tinkering with the Constitution to be annoying, both because it’s not worth wasting time trying to imagine an ideal form of government amid the obvious success of a multiplicity of them and because it’s mere gas: short of an obvious crisis generating a sense of pressing national need, it just ain’t going to happen. How about a Constitutional amendment giving the VP a real job, such as responsibility for carrying on the administration’s love affairs? It’d have kept Clinton from crippling some of his agenda, and it’d allow a progressive Edwards into the next administration.
August 17th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Re: our political culture today–and by that I mean the way the citizenry has learned, and now desires, to think about American politics (for better and worse)–demands that the president be elected.
Gerald Ford was not elected (except to his House seat) and no one much objected to his becoming president. He was in fact rather welcome after the cprruption and power-hunger of the Nixon adminsitration. He came very close to winning election of his own in 1976 too. A better economy (or had Nixon died after leaving office– he nearly did– rather than being pardonned) and Ford would have been president fopr the rest of the 70s.
Re: My usual take in these constitutional matters is to look at France. France is a large country where the President is more than a figurehead, but they organized their republic later than we did and avoided many of our mistakes.
They managed to commit quite a few spectacular mistakes of their own along the way. France has had five republics, three of which came to bad ends: The first turned into a genocidal bloodbath and sparked general warfare in Europe, the second collapsed into dictatorship almost immediately and the fourth had the stability of a manmade radioactive isotope.
August 17th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
If you ‘really’ wanted to redefine what the Vice-Presidency was for, and expand the impact democratic elections can have on the direction of a Presidency, then you could consider keeping the V-P as President of the Senate, but holding separate elections two years after those for the Presidency, for their own four year term.
The V-P is still the first in line should something happen to the President, so the vote would be a national poll on that President’s first two years in office, either a removal of their mandate, a round of applause, or something in between. But since the V-P’s term overlaps that of the Presidency, no V-P can directly challenge that President for their office. They can always serve only one term and then spend the next two years preparing to run for the top job, but by then they will either be running against someone from their own party, or against a new candidate from the other party.
There’s lots of ifs and buts in there, but it would have the certain effect of shaking up a political structure that, I think we can all agree, has become corroded and easily undermined. And it would add a shiny
August 17th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Uh
“And it would add a shiny” has nothing to do with this discussion, and the police do not have to become involved if everyone just stays cools and keeps on-topic.
August 17th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
“stays cools”?
Oh, I give in. Matt’s wide-fingered curse has done me in.
I still think it’s a good idea, though.
August 17th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Wow. A brilliant solution to the problem of an office that no one likes, wants or has a good excuse for.
Now let’s see you undo this knot that no man has yet been able to.
August 17th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
“Now let’s see you undo this knot that no man has yet been able to.”
We’ll need guns. Lots of guns, and maybe a helicopter.
But seriously, why not make it an office that some people like, some want and give it a good excuse for existing?
Otherwise your just removing the office, reapportioning the responsibilities, and keeping it all under the purview of the politial status-quo.
Heh. It’s change you can believe in, because it would have some genuine effect on how the system operates.
August 17th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
I like the original system before the 12th amendment. That way Gore and Kerry would have been in line for succession the last 8 years and I wouldn’t have had to include Bush’s health in my nightly prayers.
August 17th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
the way the citizenry has learned, and now desires, to think about American politics (for better and worse)
This is where I tend to lose patience with these topics, actually– any discussion of improving the structure and/or electoral methods of our government has to assume a voting population that’s engaged, well-informed, well-intentioned, and willing to wrestle with complicated questions. Haven’t seen any such animal in my lifetime.
Or, what JohnH @20 said.
August 17th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I’ve just found a silver lining to Dick Cheney! Holy crap!
So, Cheney is basically a geopolitics czar for Bush. What if Obama were to nominate, say, a bizarro-John Edwards and make him a poverty czar? Or make Al Gore an environment czar?
Cheney was able to be so effective because he was working through the office of the president, rather than a sub-cabinet level office. Unfortunately, Cheney is evil and incompetent, so it SEEMS like a strong vice president is a bad thing.
In fact, with such a powerful presidency as we now have, it seems pretty improbable that any president would have enough time to be well informed about every issue–notice how McCain doesn’t even try!–and a strong, trustworthy VP could take care of that.
Unrelatedly, these are probably the most important VP nominations in history, as a) Obama is the most likely president to be assassinated and b) McCain probably won’t live for 8 more years. Thus, it’s more likely than ever before that the 2009 VP will assume the presidency.
August 17th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Marshall@1: I’m convinced that liberals would gain a great deal politically if one of their own, someone who is both liberal and politically interested in seeing liberal policies enacted by the government, essentially the mirror image of Cheney, could be installed in the Vice Presidency.
Al Gore. I think most people would be down for that.
Sadly, it seems that no one who matters agrees with me.
Yeah, well, welcome to America.
August 17th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
DTM, the reasons succession through the congressional leadership (House Speaker then President Pro Tem) is a bad idea are: (1) most constitutional lawyers are convinced the current line of succession is unconstitutional — the text authorizes Congress to create a line of succession that consists of “officers” in the “Executive Branch” — the Speaker of the House is not an officer in the executive branch and neither is the President Pro Tem.
Moreover, the President Pro Tem is, according to Senate rules, the most senior member of the Senate. It seems like a bad idea to include people like Strom Thurmond, Robert Byrd and Ted Stevens within the presidential line of succession.
(2) There is no guarantee that succession to the House Speaker or the President Pro Tem would guarantee continuity — did we really want Clinton succeeded by Dennis Hastert? Cabinet succession would ensure that the interim administration reflected the values of the elected administration.
* Now, most proposals to abolish the vice presidency usually include the provision that a special election be called to complete the term. In fact, earlier lines of succession called for a special election if both the presidency and vice presidency were vacant. Most constitutional scholars agree that this could either be simply a vote to complete the present term, or a vote for a full new four-year term.
One proposal, for example, calls for the first-in-line in the cabinet to serve as Acting President until the next congressional election, when an election for a new, full-term president will occur. So when Kennedy died in 1963, for example, there would have been no special election — just the ordinary ‘64 election. When Nixon resigned, however, there would have been a special election in Nov. 1974.
Personally, I think the states would prefer just filling out the current term and not resetting the election calender — most states deliberately schedule gubernatorial races at mid-term so that they aren’t overshadowed by presidential races.
August 17th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Of course, the one major problem if you abolish the vice presidency is the question of who decides tie votes? During normal legislation, this isn’t a major problem — if it doesn’t get a majority, the legislation just dies. But what about organizing? If you have a 50-50 Senate, who decides who controls the body? So there may have to be some new provisions, like agreements to share power somehow under a coalition agreement. This could be difficult, but hardly impossible.
August 17th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
It seems to me the Office of Vice President has been naturally evolving from a do-nothing waste of space into a useful Deputy President position without us going to the trouble of a Constitutional amendment. The VP sits on the NSC and functions as sort of a free-agent cabinet member with whatever portfolio the President decides to give him. That’s not a bad thing to have.
It also settles the matter of succession in the event of the President’s death by giving both the President himself and the public a choice in the matter. Ideally, the VP would run a caretaker administration for a few months until an interim election could be held… but that’s a separate issue.
True, Cheney has tried to turn the office into a completely unaccountable power broker, but this was really just of a piece with all the other appalling decisions made by this Administration. The President has the authority to send the VP on permanent vacation if he wants to. If Cheney manipulated his position, it’s Bush’s fault for allowing it to happen.
August 17th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Forget the Vice President, we need to eliminate the office of President.
August 17th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
I get it, that’s the bucket of warm piss.
August 17th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Andrew,
Eliminating the office of the Vice President would take a constitutional amendment in the first place, so you could just incorporate the necessary succession into that amendment. Similarly, as I noted above, if you eliminate the office of the Vice President you will need a new version of the President of the Senate, and there would be no existing custom of that person being the senior member of the majority.
Finally, I don’t think cabinet succession actually does insure policy continuity, and in any event I think that consideration is trumped by other concerns people have cited above, including perceived legitimacy of the President. Indeed, just being able to work well with Congress would be a challenge facing any such acting President, which is one of the reasons to favor congressional officers. And an issue less discussed above is the matter of portfolio and experience–by nature cabinet officers have a specialized portfolio and may have relatively limited experience in government in general, whereas the presiding officers of the Houses of Congress necessarily have a portfolio roughly as broad as the U.S. government and tend to have a lot of experience.
August 17th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Matt, you could also have a designated person with no official duties except to become the president in case the president dies or is incapacitated. This was how Colombia did it for 105 years until the Constitution of 1991 established a real vice-presidency. So you might want to ask them why they decided to go for a US model (or, more accurately, a standard model that the US represents), but the example is out there in the historical record. Being a designado was pretty cool in that you might serve for a couple of days, while the president was having a gall bladder operation or just traveling abroad (which, back in the day, meant a temporary transfer of power), and you were called “expresidente” for the rest of your days.
August 17th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
My usual take in these constitutional matters is to look at France. France is a large country where the President is more than a figurehead, but they organized their republic later than we did and avoided many of our mistakes.
Yes, and it only took them five tries. And made a whole lot of more disastrous ones in the meantime.
August 17th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Matt, I think you’re underestimating just how much work is involved in being ready to take over the presidency at a moment’s notice. The reason that VP doesn’t have a “real” full-time job is because being ready to take over the presidency at any moment IS a full-time job.
In an organization as powerful and important as the US government it’s important to have redundancy of critical functions – and having that redundancy be informed is critical. There’s a reason the VP gets the same daily briefings as the president; the learning curve in today’s environment needs to be as short as possible, and in order to be effective the president needs to have a good understanding of all the information and options. Office holders like the Speaker, president pro tem, Sec of State, etc just don’t have the ability to do it all at once. Keep VPOTUS as it is.
August 17th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
All we need to do is conduct a lottery whenever the Office of the President is untimely vacated: Take the names of all the members of the Cabinet, the Speaker of the House, et al, and pick one from a hat.
Re the political legitimacy of a vice-president elected by the voters (in an election where no one is voting for vice-president), the Cabinet members are, at least, confirmed by the Senate.
August 18th, 2008 at 12:07 am
I get the feeling that with structural political issues, Matt, you think of something somewhat problematic (the general lameness of the Vice President, the oddness of the Electoral College) come up with a plan that “fixes” the problem, and then go on record saying you’re a major advocate for your plan without fully exploring the consequences of the plan. Is there anything wrong with bringing up your proposals with a “hey guys what do you think of this idea” rather than a “this is the way things ought to be?”
August 18th, 2008 at 2:04 am
Why not have the Secretary of State take over as Acting President and hold another election in three months?
August 18th, 2008 at 2:34 am
Having a VPOTUS also lowers the incentive for evil doers to plan something to force a transition of power (vs. a plan of succession that goes from POTUS to Speaker if the two offices are held by different parties).
@42: Smart people earlier pointed out that the nomination battle for Sec of State, or whoever would become Acting President, would become highly politicized—thereby reducing part of the perceived benefit of doing away with the VPOTUS.
August 18th, 2008 at 2:35 am
The obvious constitutional amendment, to my mind, would be to eliminate the election of a Veep and replace it with the current Amdt. XXV criteria for filling a vacancy: i.e. “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.”
So it becomes something that the President-elect chooses between winning and inauguration, and becomes the first business of an incoming Congress after the organising resolutions.
One obvious point is that circumstances that cause a change of presidency in mid-term are likely to be traumatic, and and successor would need to be a consensus figure. In that regard, I think the complaint about being unelected — ironic given the role of the Electoral College and the historic presumption that the House would usually decide elections — is less important.
The strong-president model is problematic for so many reasons: that’s why the Founders didn’t want it, and why it’s so rare in modern democracies.
August 18th, 2008 at 10:09 am
One advantage of the current system is that it gives the voters a chance to judge the candidates on an important decision: who their running mate will be. It’s actually something concrete, rather than just a policy position that may or may not hold up.
Certainly, you learned something when Clinton chose Gore, or Bush pere chose Quayle, or Dukakis chose Bentsen.
(I’m not sure the voters learned anything in 2000 when Bush fils chose Cheney, because Vice President Cheney has been very different from Defense Secretary Cheney (i.e., nuts vs. sane), but certainly Bush’s decision in 2004 to run with Cheney again did carry a message.)
August 18th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Obama’s speaking on our campus today in abq nm around 1pm mountain.
The buzz is he’s going to announce our gov Bill Richardson as vp pick. I’m the IT contact for them here and there will be a live stream to barackobama.com as well as ton’s of press.
I wouldn’t have thought Richardson would be a good choice 5 months ago. But he’s been energy secretary, ambassador and is on terrific negotiating terms with many of our adversaries. He’s a strong pick now.
August 18th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Vice president also cast the deciding vote in case there is a tie in the senate. That seems kind of important.
August 18th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
ed says, “My usual take in these constitutional matters is to look at France.”
France is not really a good role model to base a new governmental system on. As a republic, they’re on their fifth consitution and in between those various consitutions have been a varity of monarchial and other systems.
August 18th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
France is not really a good role model to base a new governmental system on. As a republic, they’re on their fifth consitution…
While I agree in substance, it’s worth noting that there isn’t necessarily a qualitative dimension to this — France (and, more particularly, the French) simply place a higher priority on things other than stabiilty than we do. That’s a choice a polity could make, even though — having grown up here, and owning a house in the suburbs myself — it’s not one I would support.
August 18th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
along -
Ford was appointed by nixon and confirmed by Congress not because of any particular whim nor because of all the crap around Watergate. Its what the constitution says to do.
The 25th amndment was ratified on Feb 10, 1967. It was adopted because both Truman and Johnson had served substantial portions of their successor terms without a vice president, and the polity was concerned about the death or disability of the president in those cirumstances.
August 18th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Another advantage, for Obama at least, of not picking a VP would be that it makes Pelosi next in line for the Presidency. She wouldn’t be a good choice to run with, but once Obama’s elected, she serves as a sort of assassination deterrent, in the same way Cheney did for Bush.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
>Sadly, it seems that no one who matters agrees with me [that the Bush presidency has been a success when judged by its own criteria].
Actually, I matter because I vote, and I agree with you by and large. Regarding Al-Qaeda, we beat the bastards. Thanks in part to aggressive tax cutting, the economy grew at a brisk pace for several years before the sharp slowdown last year. Where the Bush adminstration has failed is at “selling” its policies to the American people, and to the world.
Remember, at least 30% of the population approves of Bush’s performance, and at least 48-49% will vote Republican in the upcoming Presidential election. That’s not “nobody.” (Let’s hope it’s 50.1%.)
August 19th, 2008 at 5:00 am
An important consideration in abolishing the post of Vice President is whether the successor would continue or reverse the late President’s policies.
Some posters have suggested Speaker of the House. The problem is, often in recent years the Speaker has not been of the same party as the President.
The widely accepted myth is that Mondale would have followed Carter’s policies, that George HW Bush would have followed Reagan’s, etc. If you had a case where a Newt Gingrich could replace Bill Clinton or a Nancy Pelosi could replace a George W. Bush, then frankly a single well-aimed bullet could totally alter national policy.
The Office of Vice President should be maintained as a sort of last line of defense for the President. Why assassinate a leader if his/her obvious successor would carry out exactly the same policies?
August 21st, 2008 at 4:33 am
has anyone ever taken a government class in middle school?
the vice president is president of the senate. he provides a tie breaking vote in the event of a 50-50 tie. Thus, there is always a majority party in the senate.
the vp also presides over the counting and announces the result of the electoral college.
do your homework, random thinkprogress.org blogger.
August 31st, 2008 at 12:52 pm
The problem with a succession to someone in the cabinet is the fact that that person will not have been elected. While many presidents have died, only once has someone who was never elected president or potential-president (vice-president) become president. We all agree that that’s pretty constitutionally lousy.
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