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The office of the vice president of the United States is a unique one. It’s the only office in the federal government that straddles two of the three branches of government, the legislative and the executive. Since the vice president serves as an official of the executive branch but also as the president of the Senate, some in the course of history have found the office an affront to the separation of powers [source: Hatfield]. Customarily, however, vice presidents have chosen to focus on either the legislative or the executive duties, rather than both.
The vice president’s presiding powers over the Senate are largely hamstrung by the strict rules order the Senate adopted centuries ago. During the leisure time afforded during his vice presidency, Thomas Jefferson wrote a procedural handbook that the Senate and the House still use as a guide today.
While in the Senate, the vice president is expected to speak only when ruling on an issue of order, and in another case, when carrying out the Senate president’s official duty of announcing the electoral tallies for the presidential race. This has proven sticky for some vice presidents who’ve run for the presidential office and lost; they were forced to announce to the Senate the victory of their rivals. Four vice presidents — John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren and George H.W. Bush — had the satisfaction of announcing their own victories to the Senate [source: Hatfield].
The vice president’s main power is the ability to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. This isn’t as powerful as it sounds. Senate leaders commonly lobby for support for a bill before they call for a vote on the Senate floor. So senators know ahead of time whether a bill has enough votes to pass. What’s more, the Senate president’s vote only counts if the vote is affirmative; essentially the vice president can only vote yes. That’s due to Senate procedural rules that state a bill has been defeated if a tie is reached. The only effect a vice president can have in a tie breaker is if he or she votes yes to break a tie, since a no vote on an already defeated bill is useless.
Some vice presidents have taken their role as president of the Senate seriously. Thomas Jefferson saw the role as the sole one he had as vice president and stayed in Washington only when the Senate was in session. (Jefferson saw his election to the vice presidency in 1796 as a chance to rest up and await the presidency in the next election.) Vice President Spiro Agnew, who served under Richard Nixon, spent time in the Senate, but vacated the responsibility after one senator accused him of lobbying on the Senate floor, which is illegal. Vacating the presidency of the Senate is a long-held tradition among most vice presidents. According to Senate procedure, a temporary president (a serving senator) can only be chosen in the absence of the vice president. So the vice president simply leaves the Senate chambers and the Senate chooses a president pro tempore.
For the first 185 years after the creation of the office of the vice president of the United States, the people who served in that capacity were homeless. At least, there wasn’t any federally designated home reserved expressly for the use of the vice president and his family. It was up to the vice president to find and pay for his own home, which was an added expense, since most vice presidents hail from areas of the nation outside of Washington.
That changed in 1974, when Congress mandated that a Victorian mansion on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, located at One Observatory Circle off Massachusetts Ave., become the vice presidential residence. The house was formerly reserved for the chief of naval operations until Congress took custody of it for the vice president. In the 1980s, Vice President George Bush raised private donations for a remodeling of the vice presidential mansion.
In addition to the free house, the vice president is compensated for his or her service in the federal government. The Constitutional framers specified the president would be compensated but didn’t mention the vice president. From the outset, however, the vice president received an annual salary — originally $5,000. By 2008, that salary had risen to $208,100. Pay increases are at the discretion of the president and are granted by percentages of the former pay, then rounded up to the next hundred.
The vice president has a government jet at his disposal. The president’s private jet, Air Force One, is his or her exclusive domain; the Boeing 757 the vice president uses is equally decked out — complete with a fully furnished stateroom — but use of the plane is shared with the first lady and Cabinet members. When the vice president is aboard, the call sign for the plane becomes Air Force Two.
Like the president, the vice president is protected by a Secret Service detail. Unlike the president, however, the protection doesn’t extend to his immediate family, nor does the protection continue after the vice president leaves office (unless he or she ascends to the presidency or is elected to it). Secret Service protection is a 20th century phenomenon for the president; it wasn’t until after the assassination of President James McKinley that the agency began serving as presidential bodyguards, and it didn’t become permanent until 1913. Secret Service protection is even more modern for the vice presidency. In 1951, the agency officially extended an offer for protection to the vice president if he wanted it, and in 1961, mandatory protection was extended to include the vice president and vice president-elect.
The vice president has two staffs, one for the executive and one for the legislative offices. The Senate furnishes the vice president with a staff of around 40 aides, but the most trusted staff works out of the vice president’s office in the Executive Building. It’s here that the vice president’s chief of staff, national security adviser, legal advisers and speechwriters work to carry out a presidency in miniature. Prior to 1970, the vice president had to finagle free labor out of his aides or pay them himself. That year was the first that Congress appropriated funds for the vice presidential staff [source: Political Dictionary].
For the most part, vice presidents have concentrated mostly on the executive branch. One, however, has argued that because of the position in the legislative and executive branches of government, the vice presidency is ultimately beholden to neither. This vice president was Dick Cheney, who, along with Vice President Al Gore, has done more to expand and shape the office than any others.
“Throughout much of American history, the vice president has served chiefly as a reminder ofpresidentialmortality,” wrote Broder and Henneberger in the New York Times in 2000. “These eight years have proved another way of looking at the job” [source: Broder and Henneberger].
The authors were describing the vice presidency of Al Gore, a former senator from Tennessee who served from 1992 to 2000 under President Bill Clinton. Perhaps “beside” is a better word. From the outset, Gore changed the terms of the vice presidency, bringing along members from his Senate staff and installing trusted friends into appointments that customarily were assigned by the president, such as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). These appointments weren’t mere political favors; Gore made use of his friends and allies. Under the Clinton/Gore administration, the FCC oversaw the creation of a new tax on telecommunications companies. This tax funded a federal program to install Internet connections in public classrooms and the passage of v-chip technology that allows parents to block programming on their televisions.
Vice President Gore also played a further role in foreign policy. Most presidents have jealously guarded their place over this domain. Gore carved a place for his office at the foreign policy table by creating an alliance with his Russian counterpart and overseeing the removal of nuclear missiles from post-Soviet splinter states. Gore also put strong pressure on President Clinton to order air strikes against Serbs engaged in ethnic cleansing against Muslim Bosnians in the Balkans [source: Broder and Henneberger].
Vice President Dick Cheney, who served President George W. Bush from 2000 to 2008, expanded the office’s power even further. In some cases, he actually directed the president — or at least led him in a favored direction. In 2001, Cheney presented a draft of an executive order that denied a trial or court martial to terror suspects, which the president signed within an hour [source: Telegraph].
While in office, Vice President Cheney created a special top secret classification for his files, Top Secret/SCI (sensitive compartmentalized information), now the highest classification of sensitive material [source: Washington Post]. Cheney, a veteran House member from Wyoming, also served as emissary between the executive and legislative branch. He argued vehemently for the restoration of presidential powers, reasoning that they’d been limited by Congress in response to abuses by the Nixon administration (in which Cheney began his political career as an aide) and should be expanded in the face of the war on terror. Overall, Cheney was successful in his arguments.
There are drawbacks to taking an advanced leadership role; along with taking credit for the successes, the vice president also has to answer for the mistakes. Vice President Gore was roundly criticized for a deal he brokered with the Russians that allowed them to sell weapons to Iran, an illegal act on Gore’s part [source: Broder and Henneberger]. And revelations about Cheney’s involvement in the establishment of illegal treatment of prisoners at U.S. prisonsoverseas led him to be viewed as a “comic book villain” by Washington insiders [source: Telegraph].
Perhaps one reason the vice presidency has so long been a disrespected and often ridiculed office, is due to the fact that the federal government has functioned perfectly normally on a number of occasions while the seat was vacant. Throughout U.S. history, the country has had seven vice presidents die in office and one resign (more on that in a moment). These events, in addition to the eight times vice presidents have risen to the presidency following the death of apresident, left the vice presidential office unoccupied on 17 occasions.
On most of these occasions, the office remained vacant for the remainder of the presidential term, at times more than three years. In only one of those cases, following the death of Vice President George Clinton, was the position filled in less than a year. Even in the modern era, when a vice president ascends to the presidency, the office may remain vacant for a month or more as Congress vets and confirms the president’s appointed replacement. Vice President Clinton also had another distinction; he is one of only two vice presidents to serve under two different presidents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The other vice president to hold that honor was John C. Calhoun, who served John Quincy Adams and then ran with the opposition candidate, Andrew Jackson, who won.
One of President Ford’s first decisions as president was to use his power to pardon Richard Nixon of any crimes he may have committed while in office. Ford was later understood as laying to rest for better or worse a national disgrace, but at the time and for many years to follow, the pardon was seen as the worst kind of political act [source: The U.S. Senate]. Ford was defeated by President Jimmy Carter in the following election.
We’ve learned that only four incumbent vice presidents were directly elected to office, but other previous vice presidents managed to become elected as president following a hiatus from the White House. Vice President Richard Nixon ran for the presidency in 1960 but was defeated by Sen. John F. Kennedy. Nixon made it to the highest office in 1972. Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson were the only vice presidents to ascend to the presidency by means of death who were re-elected.
The vice presidency also has been a proving ground for breaking social barriers. In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro became the first female vice president to be nominated to a major party ticket when Democratic candidate Walter Mondale chose her as his running mate. The Republican Party blazed the same trail in 2008, when Sen. John McCain selected Gov. Sarah Palin for the bottom of the ticket. And the 2000 race saw the first Jewish vice presidential candidate when Vice President Al Gore chose Sen. Joe Lieberman as his running mate.
With the changes and expansion the office of the U.S. vice president has undergone in the modern era, especially with Al Gore and Dick Cheney at the helm, the scope of the vice presidency has widened dramatically. Unless any of the roles taken on by past vice presidents are codified or become steeped in tradition, though, the vice presidency will remain what it’s always been — what a vice president makes of it.