Abuse of Power or Just Government Dysfunction?

One of the main duties of the Vice President of the United States is to preside over the U.S. Senate. Article I, Section 3, Clause 4 reads as follows: The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

During the Constitutional Convention, the Framers initially planned for the Senate to choose its own president; however, after the Framers decided to create the office of Vice President, they voted eight to two that the Vice President would be President of the Senate. In his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Justice Joseph Story noted that the Framers may have made this decision to give the Vice President a role in the government.

“It has also been coldly remarked by a learned commentator, that the necessity of providing for the case of a vacancy in the office of president doubtless gave rise to the creation of that officer; and for want of something else for him to do, whilst there is a president in office, he seems to have been placed, with no very great propriety, in the chair of the senate.”

The phrase “for want of something else for him to do” perfectly describes the office of the Vice President, a position that former VP John Nance Garner once described as “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Garner, who was the Speaker of the House when Franklin Roosevelt chose him to be his running mate in 1932, also said that the vice-presidency was "a no man’s land somewhere between the legislative and executive branch."

After leaving office, “Cactus Jack” as he was known because of his bristly personality, gave an interview to Collier’s Magazine in which he referred to the office as "almost wholly unimportant." Then, in 1957, Garner told author Florence Fenley that his election as Vice President "was the worst thing that ever happened to me."

According to Justice Story, there was another reason why the Framers gave the Vice President the responsibility of presiding over the Senate. By doing so, “the Framers saved the Senate from the difficulties of selecting a President of the Senate from among themselves, which would have given the state from which the president was selected either more or less influence than the other states. If the President of the Senate retained his right to vote as a Senator, the state he represented would have three votes in the event a vote was tied. If the President of the Senate was only allowed to cast a vote when there was a tie, then his state would have one less vote than other states absent a tie.”

Makes sense to me.

Over the course of the past 235 years, 48 men and one woman have served as Vice President of the United States, from John Adams to Kamala Harris. In their role as Senate President, they have cast a total of 301 tie-breaking votes between July 18, 1789, and December 5, 2023.

Until recently, the record for most tie-breaking votes was held by John C. Calhoun, who served as VP under two different presidents: John Quincy Adams (1825-1829) and Andrew Jackson (1829-1832). Calhoun, who was an ardent defender of slavery, cast 31 tie-breaking votes, an average of four per year. In second place was John Adams with 29 over a period of eight years (1789-1797).

For the most part, the number of tie-breaking votes has greatly diminished since then. In fact, 12 vice presidents didn’t cast a single such vote, including Dan Quayle and Joe Biden. Over the past 30 years, here are the respective totals for the four men who served in that office: Al Gore – 4 in eight years; Dick Cheney – 8 in eight years; Joe Biden – 0 in eight years; and Mike Pence – 13 in four years.

And then we come to Kamala Harris, the first female Vice President in American history, who has cast a whopping 33 tie-breaking votes in just three-and-a-half years, obliterating the marks set by Calhoun and Adams, both of whom served two terms as VP. Pro-rated over eight years, Ms. Harris is on track to cast 75 tie-breaking votes, an historical pace that is more than 12 times the average.

That astronomical number of tie-breaking votes begs the question: Is Ms. Harris a power-hungry bureaucrat seeking to assert undue influence or is she simply a victim of a divided Senate? The answer appears to be both.

Four other times in U.S. history saw the Senate evenly balanced between the two major political parties. The Senate was 50-50 under both Al Gore and Dick Cheney, and yet, they only cast a total of 12 tie-breaking votes between them over 16 years. Before that, Richard Nixon cast eight tie-breaking votes during his eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s VP… and before that, Chester A. Arthur cast just three such votes before being sworn in as President upon the assassination of James A. Garfield.

And so, one must conclude that – since the other four Vice Presidents who served as Senate President with a 50-50 party split combined for 33 tiebreakers – Ms. Harris is an ego-driven partisan who is determined to leave her stamp on the legislative body over which she presides.

God help us if she is elected President.