Below The Beltway

The Biden part of it will apparently be far less inventive than his predecessor in defining the scope of his powers:

Joe Biden is laying plans to significantly shrink the role of the vice presidency in Barack Obama’s White House, according to an official familiar with his thinking.

It’s not just that Biden won’t sit in on Senate Democrats’ weekly caucus meetings – a privilege Republicans afforded outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney. He won’t have an office outside the House floor, as House Speaker Dennis Hastert gave Cheney early on.

Biden will not begin every day with his own intelligence briefing before sitting in on the president’s. He will not always be the last person Obama speaks to before making a decision.

He also will not, as a transition official calls it, operate a “shadow government” within an Obama administration.

One of the few ways he will resemble Cheney is in making clear his future ambitions, or lack thereof: Biden doesn’t expect to run for president after leaving the vice presidency, according to a transition source who was not authorized to speak on the record.

“What he has said previously is that Vice President Cheney had an overly expansive view of the vice president, almost created like a shadow government inside the White House,” said the transition official familiar with Biden’s role. “Vice President-elect Biden has a very strong view that the vice president’s role is to be an adviser to the president and to be a member of the president’s team, and that’s how he’s going to be in the job.”

I’ve noted in the past, most notably here and here, that Dick Cheney had an overly-expansive view of the nature of the Vice-Presidency and, from the earliest days of the Bush Administration moved to expand the powers of that office far beyond it’s historical limits, and even further beyond what is granted by the Constitution.

If Biden stays true to his apparent pledge to pull back on Cheney’s adventurous expansion of the powers of his office, then that will be a good thing.