VPOTUS

Not familiar with Washington acronyms? That's Vice President Of The United States.

I've written in this and other posts about how vice presidents are chosen. But what about the office itself?

As I see it, a vice president has three major roles:

1. Understudy


2. President of the Senate


3. Presidential advisor

Let's look at each of these in turn:

Understudy

If a president dies in office, resigns, or is removed by the Senate via an impeachment trial, the vice president becomes president. If the vice presidency is vacant, a congressional leader or Cabinet secretary takes over the presidency; an act of Congress prescribes an order of succession that determines who that is.

This role gives the vice president no immediate power, but huge potential power. I think that has increased the frustration level of certain holders of the office (as reflected in the quotations that opened the post to which I've linked above).

Some of the most notable presidents in American history have been vice presidents who succeeded a president who died in office, including Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson.

President of the Senate

The only significant power involved with this role is the ability to cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. That power is conferred on the vice president by Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution.

One of the most significant instances in which that came into play was in the aftermath of the 2000 election. The two parties were tied 50-50 in the Senate. When the Senate convened on January 3, 2001, Democrat Al Gore was vice president. He broke the tie in the Democrats' favor, in organizing the Senate. Therefore that party's leader, Tom Daschle, became majority leader, and Democrats chaired all of the committees. However, when Republican Dick Cheney became vice president on January 20, control switched back to the Republicans. Later in 2001, when Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican Party, the Democrats had a 51-49 majority, and control was out of the reach of Cheney's ability to vote on the question.

The Senate website has a summary of recent tie-breaking votes on legislation.

The first vice president, John Adams, attempted to assert his authority in a more general way, on matters before the Senate. But he ran into resistance on that score, and the precedent was set that the vice president's role in presiding over the Senate is largely ceremonial. Here is a description, on the Senate website, of Adams's tenure as president of the Senate.

The role of the president of the Senate is in stark contrast to that of the speaker of the House. The speaker is her party's leading political figure in the House, and exercises significant power over procedures and legislation.

Presidential Advisor

Unlike the two roles described above, this one is not prescribed by the Constitution. For most of American history, vice presidents were not close presidential advisors.

That began to change when Jimmy Carter became president in 1977. He gave his vice president, Walter Mondale, an office in the West Wing of the White House, invited him to sit in on presidential meetings, and established regular one-on-one meetings with Mondale.

Subsequent vice presidents have been more or less influential, but they have all received those three perquisites.

There is a consensus that the current vice president, Dick Cheney, has been the most influential. However, his predecessor, Al Gore, exercised significant influence in the Clinton White House; but the dynamics became less favorable later on, as Clinton faced impeachment, and Gore campaigned to succeed Clinton.

That highlights a key point regarding the advisory role: because it is based neither in the Constitution nor in statutory law, a president can revoke it at any time. No post-Carter president has totally abolished it. As I alluded to above, Gore's influence in the Clinton White House seemed to wane toward the end of that administration. And while Cheney still seems to be on good terms with the current President Bush, the marginally less hawkish foreign policy of Bush's second term could indicate a decrease in Cheney's influence.

Despite any ups and downs for vice presidents over the past three decades, it seems as though the vice president's advisory role has been strongly institutionalized, and I doubt we'll see any major move away from it in the foreseeable future. All signs are that Obama and McCain both contemplate a continuation of this aspect of the vice presidency.

One advantage of having the vice president in the advisory role is that it better prepares him or her to take over the presidency, if necessary. The most infamous case of vice presidential unpreparedness was that of Harry Truman, who became president on April 12, 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt died. Before becoming president, Truman was unaware of the Manhattan Project that was developing the atomic bomb. Less than four months later, Truman was called upon to decide whether to use the bomb against Japan. The rest, as they say, is history.