Scholar Mulls Whether US Even Needs A Vice President

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Does_America_need_vice_president_0626.html

Does America need a vice president?
Michael Roston
Published: Wednesday June 27, 2007

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To further consider these proposals, RAW STORY talked with one of the country's rare scholars of the vice presidency as an institution in American government. Joel K. Goldstein is a law professor at Saint Louis University and the author of The Modern American Vice Presidency: The Transformation of a Political Institution.

The notion of abolishing the Vice Presidency is not entirely new. In 1803, the Vice Presidency survived an 18-12 vote in the US Senate that moved to eviscerate the institution from the government. But the current motivations for closing up the nation's number two elected office differ greatly from earlier eras.

"If you had told any Vice President before Walter Mondale that in the year 2000, one of burning issues people would be talking about is whether the Vice President is too powerful, or is the Vice President really running the country, they would say that would never happen," explained Professor Goldstein.

He went on, "In a historical context, the notion that the Vice President has gotten too powerful is totally bizarre. The office was the butt of jokes to the predecessors of the Jay Lenos and Jon Stewarts for generations."

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"The office not only can put undeserving and ill qualified persons in line for the presidency, but wastes the abilities of good politicians for four to eight years, years during which he or she might serve effectively in some other office," wrote Eugene McCarthy, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, in a 1997 edition of the magazine Progressive Populist. "Service in the office may seriously impair the person's chances of being elected, if nominated, either because of failures on the part of his principal, or because of things that he or she did in service of a president."

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Adams, the first VP, called it the greatest nothing in history. We have moved from that to a VP who is completely above the law and acts with unchallenged impunity. The position has become too powerful.

Right now, we have an underserving and ill qualified person IN the presidency. So that line of argumentation doesn't persuade me very much. People actually voted for this pair (whether they stole the votes or not, a lot of Americans voted for them).

I think in principle it is not a bad idea to have the vice-president as an "understudy," so to speak, if something should happen to the president. It makes sense that someone who has shadowed them and purportedly represents the same principles should be able to step in at a moment's notice ... rather than, say, immediately the speaker of the house.

The problem that has arisen with Cheney has less to do with the power he has taken as VP but:

1. The weakness of the current president
2. The illegal things he has done.

So this is all to say: I have no problems with a vice-presidency, weak or strong. I have problems with this president and vice-president, and the latter's flouting of laws and accountability.

They both need to be prosecuted. It isn't the positions so much as the occupants.

Eight Presidents have died in office. Unfortunately, there will also be future Presidents who pass away in office. Do we really want the person who succeeds them to be somebody like Rumsfeld, who is completely unable to perform the job they've been appointed to, let alone the Presidency, but is rubber stamped by the Senate "good ole buddies" club because "Heck! The President gets to pick their cabinet! It would be rude to force them to choose somebody competent and sane."?

n/t

they have committed. What does impeachment do?

specifically the President or Vice President, so they can be prosecuted. I suggest you consult your Constitution for further details.

Clinton was impeached but not removed....

(I confess I'm no constitutional scholar)

He or she must first be impeached and convicted (thereby removed from office) and then indicted, tried, and convicted by the justice system. The problem here is that even competent Justice Departments are very reluctant to prosecute members of the Good Ol' Boys' club. The criminally inept DoJ we have now would commit mass suicide before prosecuting Bush and Cheney.

an indictment had to wait. THX

agree RE good ole boys, that is why we won't even get the first steps.

I've got a column about that here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x3341524

Humbly submitted...

as I can see we could easily revamp the list of successors to skip the VP and go directly to the House Leader which today would be Nancy. Of course Al Gore did help Clinton behind the scenes by restructuring various government agencies by downsizing them so that they worked better. However, at no time did Al Gore make decisions for the president. Al believed in the Constitution.

Originally, the Electors cast two ballots out of a single pool of Presidential candidates. The winner of the first vote became President; the winner of the second vote became Vice-President and President of the Senate. The idea was to put two rivals into the two most powerful positions in the country to serve as one of the checks and balances of government.

The 12th Amendment changed that by creating two pools of candidates, one for President and one for Vice President. This change opened the way to the croneyism that has become the office of Vice President. I say: repeal the 12th Amendment and eliminate the concept of "running mate." Had that been the case in 2000, it would have been President Bush and Vice President Gore.

for another time.

... and keep the office.

In a world where good trumps evil, the office could be a positive adjunct to the presidency. I've had the privilege to serve in elected office in two professional organizations. In both cases, I served the President in my veep years and my veep served me in my President years. Obviously this was an infinitesimally lesser office, but the principle seems the same.

When we have what was, as pointed out in the article in the OP, a national officeholder with a 'butt of jokes' role, we risk, as has happened, a gathering of as much power as possible. Rather than leaving the office's duties, ill- or undefined, just lay it all out in clear language.