The President and the Executive Branch by Mark Thorburn

Author:Mark Thorburn [Thorburn, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4645-1081-6
Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2013-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

The Vice President: Role and Responsibilities

The vice president is the president of the Senate, which means that he presides over the senators' debates and deliberations. In the early days when the Senate was small, the vice president was able to direct legislative debates, appoint members to committees, and have some influence on its agenda. However, his powers today are mostly ceremonial. For example, Vice President Walter Mondale spent only about eighteen hours a year carrying out his duties as president of the Senate between 1977 and 1981.

The vice president's most important duty as president of the Senate is to vote whenever there is a tie. Because the Senate is now larger than it once was (it now has one hundred members), the need for the vice president to serve as a tiebreaker has become less frequent. But the vice president can still play an important role in the Senate. In 2001, the Senate was evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans and Vice President Richard Cheney's tie-breaking vote swung control of the Senate in favor of the Republicans.21

The vice president's second responsibility is to assume the presidency whenever the president dies, resigns, is removed from office, or is unable to serve due to illness or injury. Only nine times in American history has a vice presidentbecome president due to the death or resignation of the president. (No president has ever been removed from office.) The vice president also temporarily assumes the duties of the president whenever the president becomes very sick or is unable to do his work. There have been only a few times when the vice president has temporarily assumed the powers of the president due to the president's inability to do his job. For instance, when President Ronald Reagan went to a hospital for cancer surgery for a few hours in 1985, he handed over the powers and duties of his office to Vice President George H. W. Bush.22

The vice president's primary job today is to serve as an adviser to the president and to lead special groups when asked to do so by the president. However, this wasnot always the case. For most of the 1800s and the early 1900s, whenever there was a presidential election, political parties selected their vice-presidential candidates in order to provide regional or political balance and to increase the party's chances of winning the election. For example, if a party's presidential nominee was from the North, then its candidate for vice president would probably be from the South. If the presidential nominee was a liberal, then the party would probably select a moderate or a conservative as his running mate. The result was that the president and vice president often did not know each other very well, if at all, until after they were elected. Occasionally, they did not even like each other, and sometimes a vice president has publicly opposed the policies and decisions of the president. Therefore, most presidents did not seek their vice president's advice or give them anything to do.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.