From ‘insignificant office’ to political powerhouse : NPR

John Adams called the vice presidency “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

Another vice president, John Nance Garner, was famously quoted as saying it wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm spit” (though his exact phrase remains in dispute).

Yet vice presidents, who are first in the line of presidential succession, have also been integral to some of the most consequential chapters in U.S. history. Eight presidents have died in office, and one — Richard Nixon — resigned, all leaving their vice presidents in control of the White House.

Other vice presidents have used their position to notch some major political accomplishments, such as the Clinton administration initiative led by Vice President Al Gore to rethink how the federal government operates.

For more than a century, early vice presidents largely spent their time on their other constitutional responsibility: presiding over the Senate and concentrating on legislative matters.

But more recent vice presidents have taken an active role in the executive branch, serving as trusted aides to the president and representing the administration on key domestic and foreign policy issues. In other words, they’ve gone well beyond the few specific duties outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

“For most vice presidents, the successor role remains contingent, whereas the operational and advising role is really their significant functional role,” said Joel Goldstein, a professor emeritus at the Saint Louis University School of Law, who has written two books on the vice presidency.

“That’s where a vice president can make a difference, as a fellow politician who can talk truth to power, as an operator who can help the president cover more ground,” Goldstein told NPR.

But it isn’t just about agreeing on politics or policy. Because presidents can’t simply fire their vice president as they might a Cabinet secretary or other government official, the working relationship between the two is critical.

Vice President Harris speaks as President Biden looks on during a White House Rose Garden event to mark National Small Business Week on May 1, 2023.

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Alex Wong/Getty Images

“It’s at least a four-year marriage,” Goldstein said. “So you better be cautious with who you select, and compatibility and establishing and maintaining a relationship matters.”

The origins of the vice presidency

In 1789, John Adams became the first vice president of the U.S. under the country’s first president, George Washington.

This painting shows John Adams, the first and second vice president of the United States. Adams called the vice presidency “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

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Adams would go on to set another historical precedent: the first sitting vice president to be elected president. (Three other sitting vice presidents have been elected president since then, as well as two former vice presidents, including Joe Biden.)

The vice president has two official roles laid out in the Constitution. The first is to succeed the president if the president dies, resigns or is removed from office. The vice president may also act as president if the president can’t discharge the powers and duties of the office.

The second responsibility is to serve as president of the Senate and break any tied votes. This is how vice presidents largely spent their time from the position’s inception through roughly the middle of the 20th century.

As vice president, Adams reportedly lobbied senators on legislation he opposed, while Vice President John C. Calhoun was known as an enforcer of the Senate’s written rules.

The modern vice president

The first big change to the vice presidency came well into the 20th century during the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower, who moved the office into the executive branch.

But the vice presidency was truly elevated to the status it holds today by President Jimmy Carter, who integrated his vice president — Walter Mondale — into the daily operations of the West Wing for the first time in history, according to Goldstein.

Vice President Walter Mondale speaks with President Jimmy Carter at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in St. Paul, Minn., on Jan. 16, 1978.

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Carter met with Mondale privately each week, invited him to government meetings, gave him staff support and told White House aides to treat a request from Mondale the same as one from himself.

“Because Mondale matters to Carter, he matters to everybody else in the American government and he matters to international leaders,” Goldstein said. “If you are talking to Mondale, you know you are talking to somebody who is worth persuading, because he can go talk to Carter and he has influence with Carter.”

After Ronald Reagan beat Carter in the 1980 presidential election, Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, suggested in an interview with The New York Times that he hoped to emulate his predecessor’s approach to the job, saying that the “Mondale model is a very good model.”

The idea of a more active, more influential vice president would become the blueprint for administrations to come and would produce some of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history, such as Dick Cheney.

Biden, Pence and Harris

Before becoming president, Biden served as President Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years and acknowledged the importance of being both an active participant in the Oval Office and second chair to the president.

“It seems to me the most significant thing that has to occur,” Biden said on MSNBC in 2016, “is you have to be simpatico ideologically with the president and you have to understand there’s a ‘V’ in front of your name. You’re the vice president.”

Under President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence acted as “sort of a liaison to traditional Republican officeholders,” Goldstein said, and Pence did some things that other vice presidents had done, including foreign travel.

President Donald Trump listens as Vice President Mike Pence speaks during a meeting on the coronavirus in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on March 10, 2020.

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Pence also famously stood up to Trump in the waning days of Trump’s presidential term, when on Jan. 6, 2021, Pence refused to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election results, which had made Biden the victor.

When Kamala Harris assumed the vice presidency in 2021, she became the first woman, the first Black American and the first South Asian American to hold the job.

During her tenure, Harris increasingly became an outspoken advocate for reproductive rights following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and represented the administration on trips across the world. In December, Harris also broke the record for the most Senate deadlocks broken by a U.S. vice president when she cast her 32nd tie-breaking vote.

According to Goldstein, many early vice presidents wouldn’t go on to get the top job, but modern vice presidents often run for president after serving in the vice presidential role.

Both Biden and Pence ran for president after being vice president. Harris ran for president in 2020, before dropping out of the race and later becoming Biden’s vice president. She is seen as having presidential ambitions for 2028.

The office of vice president has become a “very appealing — and I think the best — presidential springboard,” Goldstein said.

“It doesn’t mean that you’re going to get nominated,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you’re going to get elected. But it puts you in a better position than being a senator from Ohio or a senator from California or any other position.”