The Office of the Vice President OVP

The framers created the vice presidency almost as an afterthought, to give the runner-up in the presidential election something to do and to give the Senate a presiding officer who was not one of its members. John Adams, the first to hold the office, called it the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived. Until the Twelfth Amendment of 1804 the vice president was simply whoever finished second, which in 1796 made Thomas Jefferson vice president to his opponent. Since then candidates for the two offices have run together.

The Constitution gives the Vice President two jobs. As president of the Senate, the Vice President presides when present and casts a vote only to break a tie, a power used more than 300 times in history and with growing frequency in a closely divided chamber. The Vice President also presides over the joint session of Congress that counts electoral votes, a ceremonial duty that drew national attention in January 2021. And under Article II and the Twenty-fifth Amendment, the Vice President succeeds to the presidency on the President's death, resignation, or removal, as nine vice presidents have, and becomes acting President during a declared disability.

Every other role is a matter of presidential choice. The modern vice presidency dates to 1977, when Walter Mondale negotiated an office in the West Wing, regular private meetings with Jimmy Carter, and a role as a senior adviser across all policy, a model his successors kept. The Vice President is a statutory member of the National Security Council and sits in the cabinet. The office has a staff of several dozen in the Executive Office of the President, and since 1974 the Vice President has lived at the Naval Observatory in Washington.

The vice presidency is now the most common route to a party's presidential nomination, and fifteen vice presidents have become President. Its influence still depends almost entirely on the President. Some, like Dick Cheney, wielded enormous power, while others were kept at the margins. The office's constitutional ambiguity, belonging fully to neither the executive nor the legislative branch, has occasionally been invoked to resist congressional or executive oversight of the Vice President's own staff and records.