Vice-presidency

13 Pages 3225 Words

INTRO-THE VICE PRESIDENCY
John Nance Garner disparagingly quipped, “ [it] wasn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit.” Charles Dawes reciprocated his successors’ denigration by sniping, “This is a hell of a job. I can only do two things: one is sit up here and listen to you birds talk…the other is to look at newspapers every morning to see how the President’s health is.” Additionally, even John Adams, one of the most revered and illustrious pioneers of our democratic state, vilified the office he was first to hold, as, “…the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” If the office, prey to the verbal assails above isn’t apparent to you, then I should divulge the obvious: it is the United States Office of the Vice Presidency. The American Vice-Presidency, despite once serving as a stepping stone for fourteen future presidents, has candidly always been regarded as the most ineffective and ignored Constitutional office in the U.S.
These days, on the forefront of the twenty first century, we are far from being embroiled in a constitutional crisis debating the necessity of this office, yet the proposition to abolish the vice-presidency has and does surface from time to time. While, I was moved by the quotes I read from former VPs, such as Spiro T. Agnew, who joked, “A little over a week ago, I took a rather unusual step for a vice president…I said something,” I elected not to support the abolition of the vice-presidency. Those who differ, craft convincing arguments outlining why the Executive Branch, that creates the conflict of a “[man] is nothing but…may be everything,” is in need of such a reform. The forefront of these arguments by anti-VPs is the “flawed”12th amendment, which details how the presidency is succeeded if its officeholder can no longer serve. The irrationality in their view is that the 12th amendment pla...