IS A VICE PRESIDENT NECESSARY?

The thought must occur to President Bush’s harshest critics that, as unpopular as he is, even they fear the possibility of his departure before the end of his second term. There cannot be many Americans who might consider removing Bush who would be pleased by the prospect of replacing him with Vice President Cheney.

It isn’t a unique situation. President Richard Nixon was deeply embroiled in the Watergate scandal shortly after his reelection in 1972, but those who most condemned his shameful behavior feared that, if he were removed from office, Vice President Spiro Agnew would become the president. (The authors of the Constitution had not clearly indicated that, in such circumstances, the vice president would succeed to the title of president, but John Tyler, the first vice president whose president died one month after taking office, had himself sworn in, and every succeeding vice president has done the same.) Fortunately for Nixon’s critics, Agnew resigned nine months into his second term in an agreement that allowed him to escape trial on charges of having committed bribery, extortion, and tax evasion during his tenure as governor of Maryland. This cleared the way for the congressional inquiry into Nixon’s unlawful conduct that led to his resignation less than a year later. Imagine that Nixon had left office before Agnew, and this ignorant, bigoted and corrupt man, chosen as Nixon’s running-mate because he had delivered his state’s support to Nixon at a crucial point in the 1968 nomination campaign, had become President of the United States.

In the same fashion, imagine if President George H.W. Bush had departed from the presidency and been replaced by Vice President Dan Quayle, a choice of a running-mate that shocked even Bush’s supporters. Quayle was an amiable, ill-prepared and under-equipped Senator who is best-remembered two decades later for his misspelling of “potato” (he told a student to add an “e”) and a number of verbal gaffes, perhaps most famously his reference to the United Negro College Fund slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” as “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not having a mind is being wasteful. How true that is.”

Today a very unpopular President Bush has an even more unpopular Vice President Dick Cheney. When Congress was examining President Nixon’s role in the Watergate break-in, a business associate reported that Cheney said (and Cheney has never denied saying it), that Watergate was “a political ploy by the president’s enemies.” His support for unchecked executive power was later on the public record when, as a member of Congress, he opposed congressional investigation of possible abuses of power in the Iran-Contra scandal and commended Colonel Oliver North as “the most effective and impressive witness certainly this committee has heard.”

As Vice President, Cheney has repeatedly stated that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, that terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi established an Al Qaeda operation in Iraq, and made other claims that have been totally refuted; he persuaded President Bush to sign an order denying foreign terrorism suspects access to any military or civilian court (without informing either Secretary of State Powell or National Security Adviser Rice); he advocated “robust interrogation” of suspects, a code phrase for torture; he refused to tell Congress whom he had met to develop energy policy; he has refused to respond to a subpoena from a congressional committee, and offered the far-fetched claim (abandoned after widespread ridicule) that he was not an “entity within the executive branch.”

Of course, if he were not vice president, Cheney could make all of these unfounded (literally anti-republican and anti-democratic) claims, and President Bush could, as he has, adopt them as his own. However, because he is vice president, if President Bush was removed from office, Cheney would become president. It is beyond argument that neither Agnew nor Quayle nor Cheney would have received serious consideration as a presidential candidate. On the evidence of their political backgrounds, Agnew and Quayle would have been major embarrassments as President of the United States and Cheney would be an unmitigated disaster. His arrogance, obdurateness, passion for secrecy, and disrespect for the clear mandates of the Constitution would inspire unending constitutional crises.

Once upon a time, the vice presidency was a position that inspired ridicule. Mr. Dooley, Finley Peter Dunne’s famous fictional politician, observed: “Th’ prisidincy is th’ highest office in th’ gift iv th’ people. Th’ vice-presidency is th’ next highest an’ th’ lowest, It isn’t a crime exactly. Ye can’t be sent to jail f’r it, but it’s a kind iv a disgrace. It’s like writin’ anonymous letters.” In a similar humorous and derogatory spirit, the office was lampooned in the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Of Thee I Sing, when Vice President Alexander P. Throttlebottom discovers that his sole constitutional power is to preside over the U.S. Senate, in which he cannot introduce legislation or speak, but can cast tie-breaking votes, which don’t occur once in the average vice president’s career.

The vice presidency is no longer a laughing matter. All four nineteenth century vice presidents who succeeded to the presidency upon the death of the president had been at odds with the presidents under whom they served, and all failed to be nominated in their own right before the next election. By contrast, four of five vice presidents who succeeded upon the death of a president in the twentieth century were subsequently elected in their own right. The fifth, Gerald Ford, who succeeded on the resignation of President Nixon, failed to be elected, in large part because of the blanket pardon he had given to Nixon. Altogether, the five 20th-century vice presidents who succeeded to the office served (including four elected terms, to which they would not have been elected if they had not been first elevated to the presidency) for a little more than 22 years and ten months, very nearly a quarter of a century.

In addition, other elections have been critically influenced by an earlier president’s choice of a running-mate. VP Nixon lost in 1960 but won twice in 1968 and 1972. Former VP Mondale lost in 1984, VP Bush won in 1988, and VP Gore was denied his victory in 2000. The presidential election of 2008 will be only the third election since 1900 in which neither an incumbent president nor a present or past vice president is a major party candidate.

The argument that an incumbent vice president is better prepared to assume the presidency is often untrue.
John Tyler, the first vice president to succeed on the death of an elected president, provides an instructive lesson. One month after his inauguration in 1841, President William Henry Harrison died and Tyler became president, opposed to most of Harrison’s policies and reviled for the next four years by the party that had elected him. Theodore Roosevelt, almost certainly the most highly regarded president who succeeded on the death of a president, became vice president because the death of President William McKinley’s first vice president gave Republican New York State boss Thomas Platt the opportunity to get rid of Roosevelt as the state’s governor by having him “kicked upstairs” to the vice presidency, where he would never be heard from again. Of course, those who got rid of Roosevelt did not anticipate McKinley’s assassination six months into his second term, when Roosevelt became the president and profoundly reshaped the politics of his party and the nation.

Dick Cheney to the contrary notwithstanding, vice presidents have rarely been the confidante of the president. When Harry Truman was sworn in as president immediately after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry Stimson took him into a corner to tell him about the atomic bomb. Before that, no one had thought it important to tell the vice president.

There has to be a better way. Suppose a sudden vacancy occurred in the presidency. That day the members of Congress could either quickly convene or be polled. On the first or second ballot, a new president could be chosen. If a majority of the 535 members of Congress were of the same party as the departed president, they would choose a leader of that party, more often than not one who would have declined selection as vice president in our present system. If a majority of the members of Congress were not of the president’s party, they would opt for a change, very possibly choosing their party’s defeated presidential candidate.

Presidential candidates often make this choice of a running-mate at the very last moment in a national convention, sometimes as a quid pro quo for convention support or as a concession to their opponents in the party. We don’t choose a president in order for him to choose his successor, but that us what so often occurs. There has to be a better way, and that way would involve the elimination of the office of vice president.