Kamala Harris by Chidanand Rajghatta

Author:Chidanand Rajghatta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

THE VICE SQUAD

THE VICE PRESIDENT of the United States typically rides on the coattails of the president. The 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia that drafted the rules pertaining to electing the president did not even mention the office of the vice president. It was an afterthought aimed at ensuring that no single big state hogged all power, if its electors chose a local ‘favourite son’. Although not written into law, the protocol was, the vice president had to be from a different state from that of the president.

Still, the framers did not bestow any power on the vice president. In fact, no provision was made for replacing vice presidents who died or departed before finishing their terms. As a result, the office has been vacant for almost thirty-eight years in US history. Some presidents did not care to have vice presidents, some sidelined them, and some forgot they even existed. When William R. King, the country’s thirteenth VP, died in 1853, just forty-five days after being sworn in, President Franklin Pierce only briefly acknowledged his death at the end of a speech addressing other matters, and didn’t even bother to replace him. In 1876, when it was suggested to Rutherford Hayes, the country’s nineteenth president, that he choose a quiet congressman named William Wheeler as his VP nominee, he is said to have asked: ‘Who is Wheeler?’ Herbert Hoover failed to mention his vice president, Charles Curtis (who was part Native American from the Kaw tribe), in his inaugural address. Adlai Stevenson (the first of a long line of Adlai Stevensons) was once asked if President Grover Cleveland had consulted him about anything of even minor consequence: ‘Not yet,’ he replied. ‘But there are still a few weeks of my term remaining.’1

Small wonder then, that the office was largely deemed inconsequential, not even ceremonial, much less a sinecure: ‘a final resting place for has-beens and never-wases.’2

Even the country’s founding fathers thought poorly of it, leaving out any specific description of the role’s requirements in the Constitution beyond casting tie-breaking votes in the senate – a part Mike Pence was called upon to play the highest number of times in nearly 150 years. John Adams, the first vice president of the United States, called it ‘the most insignificant office ever that the invention of man contrived’. His successor Thomas Jefferson regarded the office as a ‘tranquil and unoffending station’, and spent much of his tenure at his estate in Monticello pursuing other interests. George Dallas, the country’s eleventh veep, who called his wife ‘Mrs Vice’, maintained a lucrative private law practice, musing about himself, ‘Where is he to go? What has he to do? – Nowhere, nothing.’ Once, Theodore Roosevelt wanted a chandelier taken down in the White House because the tinkling bothered him whenever he opened the windows in the evening to let the breeze in. When the butler asked, ‘Where do we take it?’ he is reported to have replied, ‘Take it to the vice president, he needs something to keep him awake.

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