Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
This is good news, though not as meaningful as some might think.
Dialing back his predecessor's expansive view of the office, Vice President-elect Joe Biden plans on "restoring the Office of the Vice President to its historical role" as adviser to the president and tie-breaker in the Senate, an aide to Biden said Saturday.The declaration results from an attention-getting article coming from the Las Vegas Sun, which is reporting Sunday in a story by Washington Bureau reporter Lisa Mascaro that the new Congress "will reassert its constitutional independence from the White House by barring the vice president from joining in internal Senate deliberations, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in an interview with the Sun."
Here's some background:
"The move is intended to restore checks and balances to a system that tilted heavily toward the White House in the Bush presidency," Mascaro writes. "By giving Vice President Dick Cheney regular access to Senate Republican caucuses, at times with White House advisers in tow, party unity became more important to many Republicans than upholding their responsibilities to provide legislative oversight of the executive, experts say."The paper says that when Reid was asked whether Biden will be allowed to attend Senate Democratic caucus meetings, Reid said: "Absolutely not."
Elizabeth Alexander, spokesperson for the vice president-elect, e-mailed in response: "Vice President-elect Biden had no intention of continuing the practice started by Vice President Cheney of regularly attending internal legislative branch meetings -- he firmly believes in restoring the Office of the Vice President to its historical role. He and Senator Reid see eye to eye on this."
Good news? Yes. But let's also be realistic. The notion that it's somehow going to diminish the importance of party unity is silly. Whether the VP attends policy meetings for the Democratic Caucus in the Congress or not, the Democrats in Congress are still going to coordinate their decisions with the White House if there's a Democrat in the White House. I'll be much more impressed if Congress gets serious about restoring real Congressional authority and decreasing the power of the executive branch. I'll be even more impressed if Obama encourages them to do this and advocates for it.
By the way, Biden also made a couple of obvious mistakes Biden has made in discussing such issues. There are two of them in this article, which Politico doesn't bother to point out:
Asked about the incumbent's interpretation of the vice presidency, Biden said: "Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.""The primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote," Biden said., "The Constitution is explicit. The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he's part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous."
Can you spot the two false statements in there? One is really obvious and probably just an on-the-fly mistake when speaking off the cuff. The other is a serious misunderstanding of a constitutional concept. I've discussed both of them before.
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It looks to me like:
1. Executive branch powers are defined in Article II, not Article I.
2. It's easy to misspeak because Article I defines the role of the Vice President as 'President of the Senate'. The VP has the right to preside all the time, not just when there is a tie.
Posted by: GeekCyclist | December 10, 2008 9:57 AM
I'm guessing the second is the "unitary executive" thing, which in Addington's framing means that all executive power rests with the president, or the VP to the extent that POTUS delegates authority. It has nothing to do with the VP being part of the legislative branch.
Posted by: Ginger Yellow | December 10, 2008 10:06 AM
I have two questions that rise above all others I would like to see VP-elect Biden asked: Did you read "Angler", Barton Gellman's incredible analysis of the Cheney vice presidency, and if so, please provide your perspective. http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/AI9ZL7F6SS3KO/ref=cm_cr_auth/002-8727792-0491231?_encoding=UTF8
If I got a follow-up question, I would also ask him if any of his direct reports are going to be delegated with dual roles inside the Administration? (Cheney's staffers frequently served dual roles outside the office of the VP, this was one of the major methods used by Cheney to rule over other groups within the Executive Branch he had no formal authority over).
I can not imagine taking on the office of the Vice Presidency and not reading Gellman's book. It is a masterpiece on defining the office and explaining how Cheney extended his powers well beyond the traditional role as executed by previous vice presidents including Al Gore who was considered a powerful VP during the time he served. In fact, I would recommend president-elects read it as well to circumvent the ability of the VP to usurp power from the President like Cheney did playing Bush like the lazy silver-spooner he was and remains.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 10, 2008 10:40 AM
The second mistake is indeed the claim about the unitary executive, which in fact has nothing at all to do with the scope of executive power or Bush's expansion of it. This is a very common mistake but Biden ought to know better. The "unitary executive" notion has nothing to do with the executive branch being beyond the scope of the law. The unitary executive theory has only to do with whether Congress can create quasi-executive agencies that the president does not have full control over. Bush's views on the limits of executive authority ("there are none") have nothing at all to do with the unitary executive theory, which is an entirely valid constitutional interpretation.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | December 10, 2008 11:21 AM
The institutional separation between Congress and White House gives legislators and presidents different enough incentives (and they face different constituencies) that this never comes true as much as presidents want it to.
As presidential scholar Richard Neustadt famously noted,
A couple of very good books on the topic are Separate But Equal Branches by Charles O. Jones, and Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced by Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg. They're not light reading, but if you want to know more about the institution of the presidency (as opposed to simply reading about particular presidents), put them on your Christmas list (particularly the latter--which I think is the most important book written on the presidency in the last half century).
Posted by: James Hanley | December 10, 2008 11:42 AM
James,
With the exception of social security and immigration reform, do you think the Bush Administration's relationship with Congress when it was led by the GOP had an abnormally good relationship with Congress?
My sense is that Congress acted in an extremely subservient manner to the Bush Administration with few exceptions beyond those noted above.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 10, 2008 11:48 AM
the Democrats in Congress are still going to coordinate their decisions with the White House if there's a Democrat in the White House.
Frankly, recalling the political history around the Clinton years (specifically 92-94), this is an assertion that I think only time can prove correct or wrong.
Democrats love to fight with other Democrats in public. It's actually one of the things that I think defines the party. Republicans don't - they get uncomfortable airing their dirty laundry in public (though backstabbing an opponent via surrogates or whisper campaigns doesn't really count as "public"). So unless the Democratic party has been taking notes from the GOP, I fully expect Congress to re-assert itself against a Democratic president except on the key issues where they fundamentally agree anyway, and would only need to co-ordinate to figure out how to get past obstruction from the GOP members of Congress (or, more likely, win over support from the edges of the Democratic caucus - depending on the issue at hand). Democrats just don't have the kind of party discipline to pull that kind of thing off (which I find to be a good thing - there's a reason the legislature is called a deliberative body after all).
Posted by: NonyNony | December 10, 2008 11:58 AM
Michael,
That's kind of hard to answer. Certainly Bush had a better relationship with his party in Congress than Carter did. They certainly were not willing to stand up to him, so I think your choice of "subservient" is a good one.
On the other hand, he didn't get lots of legislation through after the first couple of years. They never get him much substantive after that. Indeed the subservience may also have run the other way--Bush let them pack all the pork into budgets that they wanted. But I think overall the last 5-6 years are notable for lack of substantive policy achievements.
To really answer your question we'd have to know why that is, and I don't know enough detail to really say. Is it that Bush didn't submit much legislation because he didn't have much else he wanted to do? Or is it because, particularly after his laughable efforts on social security reform, that he didn't think he could really get anything from them?
To the extent there was little open and public bickering, I think NonyNony highlights one reason why that would be the case, aside from subservience--conservatives are less likely to fight it out in public (except for gasbags like Limbaugh, but since that's how he makes his living, he has an incentive to do so that the conservative legislators don't). But that doesn't mean the disagreements and battles aren't there, just that they're not as visible and easily observable.
Posted by: James Hanley | December 10, 2008 12:53 PM
I agree with James Hanley, but have to add my own points, first that we forget how novel an idea it was for Gingrich to try and enforce 'party discipline' and to create a semi-Parliamentary system. (It was a favorite of Academics, but no one had really tried to put it into practice before, even with much larger majorities than Gingrich ever had.)
In fact, Gingrich showed why our traditional system is better than a Parliamentary one. Not just that the sort of cross-party work like the team-up of Obama and Tom Coburn to work on government openness would have been much harder, though that was important. But mostly that if the only thing that counts is the party label, then the quality of the candidate, or his brains or honesty don't matter. Sure, we've always had 'zanies' and crooks in Congress, but have there ever been as many as recently? Cunningham, Craig, Foley, Dreier, and the magnificent idiots like Bachman, King, MacDonald and Sali just start the list.
But there are two more important implications in Obama and Biden's decision that are worth looking at. One is philosophical, a realization that there are not 'two sides to every issue.' Some have only one side -- there are no positive arguments for bigotry, homophobia, or torture that are equivalent to the negative. Others, and this is more important, have many sides. Solving our economic mess will take the combined efforts of people on either side of the aisle, and ideas from all over. A stricter 'party discipline' would squash that.
More importantly, on one of the first choices Obama has had to make on how he will govern, he chose -- typically -- to be a 'statesman' rather than a 'politician.' A politician would have argued that it was better to meet a disciplined Republican party -- more compact because of the defeat of so many 'moderates' with a disciplined party of his own. He also would have realized that, on almost every position the Republicans were on the unpopular side. Ram through a buch of party line votes and hang them out to dry.
A stateman realizes that the sort of changes this country needs requires the broadest possible support, and that demonizing the opposition -- who, sadly, do represent a substantial majority, will make it harder to create 'change that will last.' (This is very much what Obama did in the Legislature, on the 'taping police interrogations' bill. He could have passed it easily on a close to party-line vote, and used the negativew votes of Republicans against them. Instead, he worked lonh enough to pass the bill unanimously, so a possible future wave of Republicans would be unlikely to overturn it.)
So there is a bit more too it than the question of presiding over the Senate.
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | December 10, 2008 5:24 PM