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:
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“Today, San Francisco has experienced a double tragedy of incredible proportions. As acting mayor, I order an immediate state of mourning in our city. The city and county of San Francisco must and will pull itself together at this time. We will carry on as best as we possibly can.... I think we all have to share the same sense of shame and the same sense of outrage.”
—Dianne Feinstein (b. 1933)
“Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.”
—W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)
“The President is the people’s lobbyist.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals riding the outposts of the nation, from Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark. They were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“Not only [are] our states ... making peace with each other,... you and I, your Majesty, are making peace here, our own peace, the peace of soldiers and the peace of friends.”
—Yitzhak Rabin (b. 1922)