List Of Vice Presidents Of The United States
There have been 47 vice presidents of the United States, from John Adams to Joe Biden. Originally, the Vice President was the person who received the second most votes for President in the Electoral College. However, in the election of 1800 a tie in the electoral college between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr led to the selection of the President by the House of Representatives. To prevent such an event from happening again, the Twelfth Amendment was added to the Constitution, creating the current system where electors cast a separate ballot for the vice presidency.
The Vice President has few powers or duties explicitly provided for in the Constitution. The Vice President's primary function is to succeed to the presidency if the President dies, resigns, or is impeached and removed from office. Nine vice presidents have ascended to the presidency in this way: eight through the president's death, and one, Gerald Ford, through the president's resignation. In addition, the Vice President serves as the President of the Senate and may choose to cast a tie-breaking vote on decisions made by the Senate. Vice presidents have exercised this latter power to varying extents over the years. The vice presidency was described by former VP John Nance Garner in 1960 as "not worth a bucket of warm piss".
Prior to passage of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, a vacancy in the office of the Vice President could not be replaced until the next election. Such vacancies were common; sixteen occurred before the 25th Amendment was ratified–as a result of seven deaths, one resignation (John C. Calhoun, who resigned to enter Congress), and eight cases in which the vice president succeeded to the presidency. This amendment allowed for a vacancy to be filled with appointment by the President and confirmation by both chambers of the U.S. Congress. Since the Amendment's passage, two vice presidents have been appointed through this process, Gerald Ford of Michigan in 1973 and Nelson Rockefeller of New York State in 1974. The office has been vacant for 13,800 days since the beginning of the United States federal government, or for approximately 37 years and 10 months.
The vice presidents have been elected from 21 states. More than half of them have come from just five states, New York (11), Indiana (5), Massachusetts (4), Kentucky (3), and Texas (3). Most vice presidents have been in their 50s or 60s and had political experience prior to assuming the office.
Read more about List Of Vice Presidents Of The United States: List of Vice Presidents, Living Former Vice Presidents, Vice Presidents Who Became Presidents, Vice Presidents Who Served in Other Offices After Being VP, Miscellaneous
Famous quotes containing the words list of, united states, list, vice, presidents, united and/or states:
“My list of things I never pictured myself saying when I pictured myself as a parent has grown over the years.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“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)
“Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are to be made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.”
—Janet Frame (b. 1924)
“And they lie like wedges,
Thick end to thin end and thin end to thick end,
And are a figure of the way the strong
Of mind and strong of arm should fit together,
One thick where one is thin and vice versa.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet this is his very being.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)