Get Rid Of The VP Slot?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in History, VeepThat’s what Matthew Yglesias proposes, but I think it’s a bad idea.
I’ll explain why I’m against it after he explains why he’s for it…
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.
I don’t know about you, but I want to be able to know who’s a heartbeat away from being President before I vote for somebody. And just because the Veep doesn’t have any big time formal responsibilities, doesn’t mean that he or she won’t soon. Especially in the cases of McCain and Obama, there are genuine fears about longevity.
Also, wouldn’t people demand to know who the candidate would appoint SecState, SecDef, etc.? That whole process would then be highly politicized.
No, people need to vote on the #2. The framers had it right. It was a good decision and we should stick with it.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 and is filed under History, Veep. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 18th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Why bother taking a fundamentally unserious idea seriously? It’s not going to happen. Vice President is a government job, it’s never going away. :-) It would probably take an amendment to get rid of it, and it’s not the subject of controversy.
The raison d’etre for Yglesias’s piece comes from this:
• VP is a current topic of conversation
• we all think the VP is lame and doesn’t do much
•that’s all been said before a gazillion times, so the rhetoric has to be amped up to gather eyeballs: a new slant is needed
Therefore: “Let’s get RID of the VP.” Ta-daa! All that time wasted! That it will never happen and really shouldn’t is beside the point.
Bottom line is that POTUS is an important enough job that the country needs a VP hanging around doing the stuff they do (showing up at most meetings the President goes to, mostly watching and listening, chatting with people, etc) so that if anything happens to the President, we have a replacement who has been in basically all the same political loops as the President. The Secretary of State and the Speaker of the House etc don’t have that. The VP is the back-up server. He provides the sort of functionality that you hope you never need, but are hopefully smart enough to plan for. JUST. IN. CASE.
August 18th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
[...] Justin Gardner [...]
August 18th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Matt comes up with these goofball ideas every now and then. Remember him suggesting that the US would be “even awesomer” if we’d remained a colony of Great Britain?
August 18th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the framers did not specify that a candidate running for office needed to select another as his VP candidate. Rather, that was a later addition to our constitution, since initially, the candidate who came in first became president, while the one who came in second became vice-president…maybe a way to do away with the partisan gridlock is to go back to that formula. That way, if Obama won, he would be President, but McCain would be VP or vice versa…meaning, a unity ticket. Though, if I remember my history, that didn’t work out so well either, hence the change…
August 18th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
NYkrin: Yeah, the 12th amendment spells out the election of the president and vice president, with VP being chosen by the electoral college separately from choosing the president. Originally, whomever received the 2nd most votes for president was vice president — that created a bad political situation whereby the VP was constantly undermining the president’s agenda. The amendment was ratified in 1804, so you can see how long the original method lasted.
Unity tickets would be worthwhile but they probably shouldn’t be forced.
August 19th, 2008 at 7:00 am
As I’m sure you’re aware, the 12th Amendment was passed after the Election of 1800 nearly left the country without a President (and resulted in Aaron Burr almost becoming POTUS) and, before that, after the Election of 1796 left two bitter political rivals — Adams and Jefferson — as President and Vice-President. It became fairly clear fairly quickly in our history that the original method of POTUS and VPOTUS election wouldn’t work once political parties came into being.
October 2nd, 2008 at 2:52 pm
[...] Gardner makes a similar point in his response to Yglesias’ version of the eliminate-the-Veep argument: I don’t know about you, but I want to be able to know who’s a heartbeat away from being [...]