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This chapter discusses the constitutional provisions for choosing the president by electors; eligibility to the Office of President; the number of terms a President could serve; compensation and emoluments; the President's oath; disability and death; the Twenty-Fifth Amendment; the Vice President; impeachment and censure; and executive immunity.

At no point during the 2008 election campaign did the John McCain image generate much dramatic force. When Steven Schmidt assumed control over image making in early summer, even he could not liven up the image. Schmidt tried redressing the deficit of excitement by attacking the image on the other side. With the celebrity campaign running out of gas, Republicans needed to generate performative power from their own side. When McCain named Sarah Palin his choice for vice president, she officially assumed the junior partner position. Symbolically, however, the reverse was the case. The dimly lit McCain figure was plugged into the high-wattage image from Alaska. Palin had the dramatic power and the prospective political glory. Palin's paint job sparkled, and she was clearly built for power and speed. This new Republican model projected the right image, and she had many of the special features the public desired.

This chapter explores the muddy path to determining whether the president is disabled or not: the second of the five steps, in which the vice president and cabinet have four days to re-challenge the president. It is indisputable that Section 4's creators intended for the vice president to remain in charge during this waiting period, and there is ample evidence that Section 4 so provides. Unfortunately, the text of Section 4 is unclear, so it has occasionally been misread as placing the president in charge during the waiting period. As seen in this chapter's hypothetical scenario, if push ever comes to shove, things could go very badly. When Section 4 was being debated, Senator Robert Kennedy worried about a situation in which “[t]here would be two Presidents and two Cabinets.” This skittishness might explain why Section 4 has never been used.

This chapter explains a notion that every American schoolchild learns: that the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate (PPT) follow the vice president in the line of succession. Fictional portrayals of presidential disasters often draw on this rule, but they fail to acknowledge that it is constitutionally problematic for the Speaker and PPT to be in the line of succession. Not all legal experts agree on this point, but most of them do, and their criticism is harsh. They call the succession law “the single most dangerous statute in the United States Code,” “intolerable,” “disastrous,” and “an accident waiting to happen.” Even if one thinks that these experts are wrong, their arguments cast a dark shadow of uncertainty over presidential succession.

This chapter discusses the creation of the office of the Vice-Presidency. While the Vice President’s duties have been minimal during much of the nation’s history, the office proved to be vitally important on numerous occasions in the period between 1841 and 1964. Eight times during that period Vice Presidents succeeded to the presidency upon the death of the President; eight times the country was led successfully through the trauma caused by the loss of the President. Yet the vice presidency had been vacant often in the period prior to 1965. Despite vacancies totaling more than thirty-seven years, no serious effort was made to devise a means for filling a vice-presidential vacancy until after the assassination of President Kennedy.

Despite his frustration at being second in command, Johnson's vice presidency enabled him to develop his civil rights credentials. His role as chair of the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity allowed him to work directly with civil rights leaders, and he developed closer relationships with Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the Urban League, and Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Campaign (SCLC). During this period he increased his knowledge of the injustices suffered by African Americans, developed his understanding of the growing demands of an activist civil rights movement, and emerged as a strong supporter of immediate change. Civil rights crises in St. Augustine, Florida, and Birmingham, Alabama, convinced Johnson that the nation must end racial segregation, and by mid-1963 he took a firmer pro-civil rights stance than President John F. Kennedy.

Republican ideas required the separation of the executive from other institutions, but they did not stipulate how separate institutions would check one another. The delegates worked out these issues piece by piece, trying to balance executive powers with protections against the abuse of executive power. After the Connecticut Compromise, the struggle for executive independence spilled over into decisions about the president's term, removal, successor, appointment power, and veto. The delegates agonized over the length of the president's term because it would help determine the autonomy of the office. Presidential impeachment, succession, cabinet, appointments, vetoes, pardons, and the vice-presidency each required the compromises to fine-tune the balance between presidential and Congressional power. By incremental steps, the delegates increased the president's independent authority, while they isolated him within the government and established checks on his powers.

This chapter discusses the appointment of Nelson A. Rockefeller as Vice President, following Gerald R. Ford’s ascension to the Presidency. On August 6, three days before Nixon’s resignation, Melvin Laird, a close adviser to Ford, predicted flatly that Nelson Rockefeller would be Ford’s choice as Vice President. Following his swearing-in as President on August 9, Ford told congressional leaders that he would nominate a Vice President within ten days. In the afternoon of the day he was nominated, Rockefeller stated his belief that Ford had every intention of running in 1976. However, On November 3, 1975, in a letter to President Ford, Rockefeller announced that he would withdraw his name from consideration for the 1976 vice-presidential nomination so that Ford’s “range of options” might be “simplified at the earliest

This chapter talks about President William Henry Harrison's death due to pneumonia after just a month in office. Popular legend has it that Vice President John Tyler was momentarily stunned when Fletcher Webster, a State Department official and son of the secretary of state, pounded on the door of his Williamsburg, Virginia, home at sunrise on April 5 to awaken him with the news of President Harrison's death. Another tale about that momentous day, delightful for its rustic simplicity and republican innocence, had the fifty-one-year-old aristocratic Virginian playing marbles with his sons in front of his home when the young Webster arrived from Washington. Tyler initially may have been startled by the dispatch from Harrison's cabinet announcing the president's death, but surely the marbles tale is apocryphal. It surfaced decades later in the early twentieth century, long after the principal parties involved had died, in a breezy and unreliable collection of personal reminiscences about former presidents.

After World War II, Barkley chaired the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack. His committee’s recommendations were later fulfilled by passage of the National Security Act, which created the Central Intelligence Agency and what was ultimately called the Department of Defense. After GOP victories in 1946, Barkley could express his gratification for bipartisan support for foreign affairs during the Cold War by approval of Greek-Turkish aid and Marshall Plan. At the 1948 Democratic national convention, Barkley was named the party’s vice presidential nominee on a ticket headed by Truman. Truman went on a whistle-stop campaign, but Barkley flew on the first prop-stop campaign. The pair won in one of the most incredible upsets in American politics. The Veep became the first working vice president in American history. He supported Truman via speeches made across the United States and served as the administration’s point man in the Senate.

This chapter focuses on the president's duration in office, the possibility of impeachment, and the role of the vice president in government as spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. It first considers the debate at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention about the “ideal length” of a presidential term, with particular attention to Alexander Hamilton's arguments, before turning to the impeachment system as a means of exercising effective accountability over problematic presidents. It then examines the particular problem of presidents who become disabled while in office and concludes by outlining the reasons for having a vice president.

This chapter describes the election of 1800. As initially drafted, the Constitution said that the president was the candidate who received the most Electoral College votes, and the vice president was the person who came in second. Had that system remained in place, Donald Trump's vice president after the 2016 election would have been none other than his political foe, Hillary Clinton. The framers, most notably George Washington, recognized the existence of political parties in the states, but most framers shunned the idea of political factionalism as anathema to the proper functioning of the new federal government. They instead thought that the Electoral College could help to foster consensus building. Yet here we are, with Democrats and Republicans engaged in political warfare, ideologically dueling in every election. The continuing partisan clashes stem in part from the Twelfth Amendment, which was a direct response to the controversial election of 1800.

This chapter traces General Renè Barrientos' rise from air force chief to vice president during the first half of 1964, during which time he suffered a mysterious assassination attempt hours before he was set to depart for London as embassy air attachè. With public opinion mobilized behind Barrientos' vice presidential candidacy, President Víctor Paz reluctantly chose the young general as his running mate. Barrientos was loyal to Paz in early 1964, bragging widely that he had copiloted the plane that brought Paz back from Buenos Aires in the days following the 1952 revolution. However, Paz's dismissal of Barrientos as an “uncultured jock” convinced the general to join civilians who were opposed to the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) regime.

Chapter 4 focuses on Grace’s ties with men in the SWP. In addition to platonic friendships and work relationships she forged with men like James Cannon, Farrell Dobbs, and her brother-in-law, Henry Schultz, Grace also engaged in a romance with Vincent Raymond Dunne for over ten years. Both Grace and Ray were married to other people at the time: Grace had separated from her husband, Gilbert, sometime in the late 1930s, but Ray never left his wife, Jennie. As a result, only a few party insiders knew for certain about the affair. But Grace’s and Ray’s dedication to the SWP, among other factors, drew them together. Their relationship was just one of many within the SWP in which couples enjoyed sharing in the common work of the party. Private relationships became intertwined with public commitments and helped build and sustain the radical politics of those involved, who otherwise faced a world hostile to their beliefs. Of particular importance to Grace’s political career in these years was her run for vice president of the United States in 1948, the press coverage of which included deeply entrenched biases against women running for such high office—some of which still remain today.

The acute lack of women’s leadership throughout the history of the European Commission is best illustrated by contrasting the list of female vice-presidents with the overall number of presidents and vice-presidents that have run the institution to date: of 89 presidents and vice-presidents between 1958 and 2019, only seven have been women, including the two female High Representatives who served ex officio also as vice-presidents. Analyzing women’s and men’s rhetoric, this chapter focuses on the five female politicians who have served as vice-presidents of the European Commission as of 2019—Loyola de Palacio (1999–2004), Margot Wallström (2004–2009), Viviane Reding (2009–2014), Neelie Kroes (2009–2014), and Kristalina Georgieva (2014–2016)—and one High Representative, Catherine Ashton (2004–2009). It examines the characteristics of EU women leaders’ rhetoric and evaluates to what extent EU women leaders make use of charismatic rhetoric in their speeches. In addition, it investigates what trends may be identified over time as well as how and in what ways women leaders’ rhetoric differs from that of their male counterparts. Empirically, the analysis is based on software-assisted content analysis (Diction 7) of the entire corpus of speeches of the members of the European Commission between 1999 and 2019.

The European Commission is the executive of the European Union and one of its institutions. Its seat is in Brussels, although some of its departments are located in Luxembourg. The provisions relating to its composition and role and to the duties of Commissioners are to be found first and foremost in Article 17 TEU and Articles 244 to 250 TFEU.

This chapter features a defining feature of 2008—the lack of incumbents eligible to run. No sitting president or vice president would be on the ballot. Governor Mike Easley was ineligible to run after two consecutive terms. Of North Carolina's three toptier races—president, governor, and U.S. Senate—only the race for senator featured an incumbent, and Elizabeth Dole appeared likely to win a second term. Despite the party's setbacks two years earlier, North Carolina remained a Republican-leaning state in presidential and senatorial races. The state seemed comfortable with Dole's issue positions. On a very few issues, her voting record had been less conservative than the voting records of Senators Jesse Helms and Richard Burr. She projected a moderate image to white women, a key voting bloc.

This chapter opens by giving the general background of property issues followed by their treatment in the First Amendment. It discusses the First Amendment's provisions relating to property, focusing on agricultural property and the nationalization of commercial and industrial property. The Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the government legislation and rules changing property relations and removing the ‘man-made inequalities’ of which Vice-President Radhakrishnan had spoken. Remedy again was sought in amending the Constitution. At the heart of the confrontation were issues crucial in any democracy, and especially in India's, with its hierarchical social system, its predominantly agricultural economy, and its vital interest in the seamlessness of the web: individual interest against the national interest; government's role in reforming society; and conflicts between ‘law’ and ‘justice’. The chapter concludes with the amendment's provisions that deal with remedial treatment for disadvantaged citizens, variously called positive discrimination and compensatory discrimination.