Acting Vice President of the United States is an unofficial (and incorrect) designation that has occasionally been used when the office of Vice President was vacant.
The president pro tempore of the United States Senate assumes the role of presiding officer over the Senate in the event that the vice presidency is rendered vacant either by death, resignation, removal from office or succession to the presidency. Under the 1792 Act of Succession, in the absence of a Vice President, the President pro tempore was next in line for the powers of the presidency.
Historically, some have referred to the President pro tempore under these circumstances as "Acting Vice President." However, no such office exists in law or tradition. No person who could ever have been regarded as "Acting Vice President" has ever succeeded to the powers and duties of the Presidency, even in an acting capacity. Lafayette Foster and Benjamin Wade would have been the closest to become President. Following the adoption of the 1886 Act of Succession, the President pro tempore of the Senate was no longer next in line for the presidency after the Vice-President.
Nonetheless, James Eastland, Senator from Mississippi, was referred to as "Acting Vice President" twice while he was President pro tempore in the 1970s, during periods of a vacancy in the vice presidency. The first occurred following the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, prior to the appointment of Gerald Ford to replace him, and the second occurred when Ford became president, vacating the vice presidency, before Nelson Rockefeller was confirmed as his replacement. During both these periods, however, Speaker of the House Carl Albert was first in the line of succession to the presidency under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, ahead of Eastland.
In 1964, presidential advisor Richard Neustadt, proposed the creation of a statutory office of Acting Vice President in hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The proposal was never adopted.
Famous quotes containing the words united states, acting, vice, president, united and/or states:
“In the larger view the major forces of the depression now lie outside of the United States, and our recuperation has been retarded by the unwarranted degree of fear and apprehension created by these outside forces.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It’s a bum’s life.... The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.”
—Marlon Brando (b. 1924)
“If the vice president thinks it’s disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child, and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he’d better make sure that abortion remains safe and legal.”
—Diane British (b. 1948)
“We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)