Below The Beltway

As we get ready to watch this year’s Vice-Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, yet another scholar is out making the argument that would should eliminate the office they’re running for:

For two centuries, presidential nominees have used the office to balance the ticket by naming a running mate from a different region, or one who speaks with a different ideological accent to a specific constituency. This means that a president’s death generates a double shock: The nation not only mourns a fallen leader, it must deal with a replacement who may push politics in a new direction.

Teddy Roosevelt — who replaced William McKinley when he was assassinated in 1901 — may have been a great progressive president, but he had been named as vice president by the arch-conservative McKinley simply to carry New York. The country elected a right-winger but ended up with something else entirely.

Similar perverse logic led Abraham Lincoln to choose Andrew Johnson as a running mate. Lincoln knew that Johnson was a racial conservative, but he was more interested in carrying Tennessee. This tragic blunder clouds Lincoln’s claim to greatness. When Lincoln was killed, Johnson’s bitter opposition to Reconstruction helped poison race relations for generations.

Recent elections have lulled us into a false sense of security. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush nominated like-minded, known-quantity running mates, as has Barack Obama this time around. But John McCain’s surprising choice should lead us to think again. Mexico and France see no need for a vice president. We should designate the secretary of State to be in charge until a special election can be held to replace a president.

Matthew Yglesias made pretty much the same argument in a blog post back in August while we were waiting for Barack Obama and John McCain to choose their running mates. And, Ackerman is wrong for many of the same reasons I noted that Yglesias was wrong back then:

One of the values of having a popularly elected successor to the President is that it helps to maintain a sense of democratic legitimacy to the office. If the Vice-Presidency were to be eliminated and the line of succession changed so that an unelected office holder like the Secretary of State, or one elected only by a small number of people such as the Speaker of the House or President of the Senate,  would become the immediate successor to the office, the first thought that would come to the minds of many people would be — who voted for this guy ?

There is, in other words, in having a Constitutional line of succession to the Presidency that starts with someone who was popularly elected in the same manner that the President was.

Justin Gardner makes a similar point in his response to Yglesias’ version of the eliminate-the-Veep argument:

I don’t know about you, but I want to be able to know who’s a heartbeat away from being President before I vote for somebody. And just because the Veep doesn’t have any big time formal responsibilities, doesn’t mean that he or she won’t soon. Especially in the cases of McCain and Obama, there are genuine fears about longevity.

Also, wouldn’t people demand to know who the candidate would appoint SecState, SecDef, etc.? That whole process would then be highly politicized.

No, people need to vote on the #2.

And James Joyner notes that Ackerman’s argument that we really don’t need a Vice-President doesn’t make a lot of sense in the real world:

[It is] rather like saying that football teams don’t need a backup quarterback because, after all, the other guy is likely to have a different style and we’d therefore be better off having the kicker fill in.

The death of a sitting president is, as Ackerman points out, a national shock.  If it comes as a result of assassination or other unnatural cause, it’s a genuine national crisis.  That’s not a great time to be fumbling around for a successor, let alone scrambling to hold a special election.

And that’s exactly why we have a Vice-President to begin with.