Vice President vs President of the Senate

President Cheney has made a very interesting point. (By "president" I'm referring to his role in the Senate.) He is claiming that his office--the dual office of Vice President of the United States and President of the Senate--is immune to restrictions placed on the Executive Branch, because it is "also" part of the Legislative Branch. The scare quotes around "also" signal the thesis of this article: I think that on constitutional grounds, the office of the President of the Senate should be primary over that of Vice President of the United States, and therefore, that Cheney's office is wholly in the Legislative Branch unless the President of the United States should die or pass control under the 25th Amendment, at which point it leaves the Legislative Branch and passes to the Executive.

Historically, that is, in the original unamended US Constitution, we have several indications as to the role of the dual office:

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided. The Senate shall choose their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.

Also, the original process of the Electoral College included three indications, that the term and election is identical to that of the President of the United States:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same term, be elected, as follows...

and that the President of the Senate has a unique ceremonial role in the process itself:

The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted

and that the Vice President/President of the Senate is the person receiving the second highest number of Electoral College votes

In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall choose from them by Ballot the Vice President.

Finally, the rule regarding succession is laid out:

In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President...

That's the unamended US Constitution.

Note that in the original version, this office has three roles in the government: to be President of the Senate, to preside over the Electoral College, and to succeed to the presidency should need arise. The 12th Amendment refines this process slightly, and in a way that strengthens the thesis of the present article. It provides that instead of the runner-up to US President becoming the Vice President/President of the Senate, that person must run and be elected explicitly. It also provides that in case of an Electoral College tie, the Vice President/President of the Senate be elected by the Senate. There are quite a few further amendments that affect the office in ways that are not relevant here.

Therefore, it seems to me quite plausible that this dual office may have been conceived originally as yet another way to balance power between two branches of govenment. By electing the President of the Senate via the Electoral College, the considerations of the people regarding the chief executive would be maximally respected when the Vice President becomes President of the United States. Furthermore, by creating an office of President of the Senate elected by all of the states, and with a term shorter than that of the other senators, there would be a stronger connection of the people of the United States with the upper house of the legislature, whose members would otherwise be responsible only to their individual states. Therefore, what we see today as a fairly useless position of Vice President was probably intended to be an active President of the Senate, the second most powerful position in the federal government.

The problem is that the President of the Senate, being voteless except in case of a tie, was never given any real power in the Senate itself. Or, to say it another way, the power granted the President of the Senate was taken away by senate rules passed by senators unwilling to be limited by the power-balancing schemes of the Founders. In addition, because of the fact that the office of Vice President is much "sexier" because of its potential power upon the death of the President of the United States, it is that role which has been given strong emphasis by those who hold the office. To my knowledge, there has been no President of the Senate who actually exercised its powers, and this has also caused those powers to whither to the point of irrelevance.

However, those historical facts do not change the US Constitution. If we remember our basic logic, which says that if A is identical to B that we can always substitute A for B and vice-versa, then we can see that the office of which we are speaking is a single office: to be the President of the Senate and of the Electoral College, and to be the first in line to succeed the President.

Note that the second in line of succession is, interestingly enough, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Now, because such a sequence was deemed much less likely, a special form of election was not provided for this office, nor was a second name (such as "Second Vice President") invented, although such a name would be perfectly valid. But in spite of this, there is an undeniable symmetry in the fact that the President of the Senate, the upper house, is first in line, and the President of the House (known as the "Speaker", but the offices are basically identical) is second in line. This symmetry is also strong evidence that the office of Vice President aka President of the Senate is not an executive office at all, but a legislative one.

In summary, it appears that the office of the Vice President aka President of the Senate has been grossly misinterpreted during over 200 years of history. It has wrongly been considered an Executive Branch office, with unfortunate consequences, and the Senate has lost the benefit of a president elected by all of the states. The presidents of both houses of Congress are in the direct line of succession to the presidency of the United States, and therefore, they each deserve certain considerations, such as being fully informed regarding the activities of the Executive Branch. However, they also have strong roles to play in their home Legislative Branch, and therefore when either one of them, the President of the Senate, or the Speaker of the House, becomes President of the United States, it must, under the Constitution, be seen not as a promotion of a member of the Executive, but as a transition whereby on of the leaders of the Legislative Branch moves to the Executive to assume new duties and powers there.

The one thing that we can do to try to move things in this, the constitutionally correct direction, has to do with names. This office has two names, "Vice President of the United States" and "President of the Senate". For historical reasons alluded to above, the former is seen as more powerful than the latter, and is the more commonly used. However, the apparent relative power of the two positions is an error: the Vice President has no constitutional role in the daily function of the Executive Branch, but a key role in the Senate. Therefore, we should begin by referring to the Vice President as "President (of the Senate)", as I did at the top of this article. Perhaps it isn't too late to mend this hole in the Legislative Branch, and to remove a pernicious growth from the Executive.

For some additional discussion of this thesis, please go here.

Mr. Cheney: the waiting game in Iraq is already over

Vice President Cheney has suggested that those in Congress who seek to bring the American military adventure in Iraq to an end--at least he no longer calls them "Democrats", because more and more Republicans are leaving the sinking ship of the administration's foreign policy--are undercutting the war† effort. His logic is that if we establish a time limit, the enemy‡ will be able to "wait us out". The problem with this logic is that there was never any serious question about who will win a waiting game in Iraq.

The Iraqi people, including Saddam Hussein even before the invasion, understand very well how much is is costing America to maintain a military occupation so far from their home base, in a region where there is very little support from neighboring countries. How much does it cost for an IED or a suicide belt, compared to the cost of an attack helicopter, a nuclear aircraft carrier, or a stealth bomber?

An useful parallel can be drawn between the colonial insurgents during the American Revolution, compared to the British soldiers. Once the fighting began, the British, who in effect became military occupiers of what was formerly considered their own soil, could no longer count on getting food and other support domestically. They were separated from their home base by weeks of sea travel. Once the French navy made it impossible for English ships to come and go freely, the war was effectively over for the British. The American rabble starved and had a miserable time of it at Valley Forge and so on, but anyone who looked at the situation in the longer term understood that in the end, England simply couldn't win the waiting game.

In fact, there no longer is a question as to whether we can win a waiting game. The actions in Congress and in the public polls can't cause us to fail, because what they clearly indicate is that we have already lost. This "war" is already longer than the American portion of World War II. Even though the Iraq action is, from the American perspective, much smaller than WWII (probably it doesn't seem so small to the Iraqis), we are war-weary even though much of its dust has been swept under the mass media rug in this country, and by "dust", I mean the toll in terms of death, injuries, broken lives and families, not to mention the true cost in $$$. For the American people, most of them, the thrill is gone. This wasn't true in the adventure's first year, although I'll never understand why it wasn't, but it certainly is now.

As usual, it is easy to complain about a war, but harder to suggest an alternative (although see my post on this blog called Cheapskate philosophizer's Iraq withdrawal plan). I think that we must withdraw, because as I just said, almost all of the violence in Iraq stands on one shared leg: the occupation. Once our military leaves, that leg will be gone and much of the support for the violence will be gone with it. So leave we must. But we also have a moral obligation to the Iraqi people to repair the damage we have done to them and to their country, and these reparations can most usefully take the form of foreign aid, not in the form of bringing in Halliburton and its clones to make thousands of millions rebuilding what our bombs have destroyed, but as aid to the Iraqi people as directly as possible. Let the Iraqis themselves rebuild what we have destroyed, on our dime but according to their preferences and on their timetable.

Will there continue to be violence once we're gone, and will the violence spread throughout the region? There will be, as there has been for centuries, violence among religious factions in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. Did anyone really think that we could stop that by establishing the neocons' erstwhile "stable democracy"? Does it contribute to the magnitude of the failure of our invasion and occupation to admit that there will still be civil, interconfessional violence there? I think not.

Will the violence spread throughout the region? Well, perhaps it will, but hasn't been obvious for years that foreign involvement against America in Iraq has been largely motivated by a perversion of the Bush-Cheney mantra that we are fighting them in Iraq so we won't have to fight them at home? That is, if you are really angry at America and want to harm Americans, then even if you could never amass the time, materiel, and other resources required to mount any kind of attack against the American homeland, you can still hitchhike to Jordan and go across the border into Iraq, where you'll be given the means and the opportunity to make your attack. In other words, our occupation forces are a magnet and an accelerant for violence in the Iraq region. I believe that the odds of regional violence will decrease, not increase, once we leave.

There could be one important exception, but it is a self-limiting one, I think. If Iran, in cahoots with the present Shiite-dominated national government, attempts to annex militarily part of Iraq, then there could be regional violence, because Iraq's and Iran's other [Sunni] neighbors would not sit still and let that happen. The most straightforward way to prevent it would be to have negotiations in advance with the Iraqi government and those of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and so on, in order to establish limits and consequences. Neither America nor Isreal should be present, although I see nothing wrong in those nations working behind to scenes to make the meetings happen. And even without formal meetings of that sort, the balance of power is fairly well known there, and while Iran can be belligerent against American-occupied Iraq without serious regional repercussions, I don't think the same would be true once the Americans leave. There is a somewhat similar, but (I believe) less likely possible scenario with the Kurds and Turkey, who of course fear that a stable and largely independent Kurdish nation will destabilize their own Kurdish region. However, there are also natural counterweights to any major action by Turkey against Iraqi Kurdistan, including the potential intervention by neighboring countries. Furthermore, Turkey's own ambition to join the EU, which would seriously harmed by blatant militarizing against the Iraqi Kurds, reduces the likelihood of action by Turkey.

The bottom line has three parts: (1) Mr. Cheney, we have already lost the waiting game and never had a chance to win it in the first place. (2) We must make reparations to the Iraqi people after we withdraw our forces, and we should do it in a way that maximizes the role of Iraqis in the rebuilding process. (3) Violence, and the threat of future violence, will go down only once our military forces leave Iraq.

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†Well, Cheney calls it a war, but it seems to me that while there was a very brief war against the former government of Iraq, which we won in a few weeks, and even declared victory, more or less, or at least displayed banners that said "Mission Accomplished", what we have there now is nothing more than a post-war occupation. Iraq is occupied territory, and while there are quite a few factions that are going around killing people, the one thing that unites most of them is their desire to throw off the yoke of the occupier.

‡Again, Cheney views the people who are blowing each other up as "the enemy", which I suppose is shorter than a more accurate characterization. But they aren't really our enemies in any conventional sense. First and foremost, once we leave, very few of them will have any interest in attacking us any more. To the extent that they attack Americans at all, their purpose is simply to get us to leave. But far more of the attacks are on their fellow Iraqis, and are motivated by both attempts to seize and to consolidate power that will remain after the current chaos resolves and the Americans leave, and by ancient animosities and recent grudges and the desire for vengeance against their former oppressors, or for re-vengeance by the former oppressors against those who have already taken vengeance. So it would at least be more accurate to call them "the enemies", since almost all of them are someone's enemy. But calling them "the enemy" as Cheney has done is a grossly misleading oversimplification of the problem. I'm 100% certain that he damn well knows that, and that his terminology was chosen very carefully in order to cast the Iraq occupation for the American electorate as a conventional war, with "enemies" and "victory".