And appoint a new VP ?
And what happens if Pence resigns ?
No.
The Vice President runs with the President, but he’s elected separately.
If Pence resigns, Trumps appoints a new VP, who would then have to be ratified by both the House and Senate.
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No.
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25th ammendment - Trump picks a new VP, who has to be approved by both houses of congress. It happened with Spiro Agnew during the Nixon Administration. Since Nixon was forced to resign, Gerald Ford became the only person to become president without having been elected as either President or VP.
Don’t forget that Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller to succeed him as VP, so the 25th Amendment has been used twice.
The only way to constitutionally remove a Vice President is through impeachment by the House of Representatives followed by conviction by the Senate.
A Vice President can be pressured to resign, as in Agnew’s case, but he cannot be fired.
One wonders how Watergate would have played out id the 25th Amendment had not been passed so Ford had not been appointed VP. Speaker of the House at that time was Carl Albert a Democrat from Oklahoma. Would Nixon have fought harder not to resign if he were going to be succeeded by a Democrat?
Ford also appointed Nelson Rockefeller as his VP under the 25th amendment
By the time Nixon resigned, impeachment was all but a certainty. And when impeached, he would have been found guilty. Either way, he would have been out of office. Nixon wasn’t stupid; he knew he was licked.
As a matter of custom and practice, practically nobody in DC gets “fired”. It’s always “I’d like your resignation on my desk”. That’s not just a thing from TV, it’s actually how those levels operate.
As such, “asked to resign” is often reported as “fired”, because, well, there’s no real difference. “I don’t want you working here anymore” is the same concept, regardless of how politely it’s worded.
But that’s where confusion comes in.
The President can ask the VP or the Secretaries to resign. In most cases, when such a request is made, it’s in their best interest to oblige.
But, and here’s where it gets sticky, the President can’t fire them. Unlike run-of-the-mill staffers, they can, theoretically, refuse to resign and retain their job.
But, again, that’s generally a bad idea.
So it comes down to your definition of “fired”. If you include “strongly request a resignation with a vow to end their career if they refuse” in with the term, then the answer to your question is theoretically “yes”. If you limit to strictly “the ability to remove from office”, the answer is, as everyone said above, “no”.
That’s incorrect. Cabinet members can be fired by the president–the term of art is that they “serve at the pleasure of the president”–even though in real life there’s usually some face-saving reason for “resignation.”
The VP cannot be fired or replaced without impeachment. Famously, this worried Dick Cheney so much that he drafted and signed a letter of resignation, kept in his legal counsel’s safe, so that if he became incapacitated (like in a coma), George W. Bush could accept the pre-exisiting resignation to make the appointment of a new VP easier.
The President certainly can fire a Cabinet secretary. President Johnson did that with the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. It triggered his impeachment, which he survived. His basic point was the the President had the right to choose his closest advisors, and that included the power to fire them.
Can’t find a cite quickly, but I’ve read that Carter personally fired Energy Secretary James Schlesinger (rather than asking for a letter of resignation) because Schlesinger was such a towering asshole. Ford had also fired Schelsinger (for the same reason) but I don’t know whether in that case it was more “accepted his resignation.”
Y’all are right of course–I don’t know what I was thinking when I said that.
That being said, a strong number of cases of DC firings are just resignation “requests”. Even a VP would be wise to honor them if he hopes for a political future.
Similar sort of thing in the UK: it’s quite often “I’m grateful for your work on [project x] and bringing it to the stage where it’s time for a fresh face to handle presentation of this particular area”, which is code for “You’ve made a right mess of this” (though Attlee was famously brutal - when one junior minister was given the push and asked why, Attlee just said “Sorry, not up to the job. Good morning”).
Or sometimes the politician in question suddenly decides they need to “spend more time with the family”: to the point where an opposition MP once said “I have nothing against X’s family, but I do think he should spend more time with them.”
Albert announced that as a Democrat he felt he had no right to the presidency because the people had elected a Republican ticket in 1972. He was briefly next in line to the presidency after Agnew resigned and before Ford was confirmed. His plan was to accept the presidency as a caretaker, follow through with the appointment of Ford, and resign as soon as Ford was confirmed. It’s hard to imagine something like that happening in today’s hyper-partisan environment.
Very.
It’s why the cynical side of me is wondering if it’s actually true.
Not every politician aspires for the White House. Presidential candidates look for it. VPs accept it. Everyone else just kind of does their job assuming that it’ll be handled by one of those two guys.
Personally, if I went from being Speaker of the House to President of the United States, I’d be looking for a way out. It’s a completely different ballgame, and one that it doesn’t look like Carl Albert ever sought out.
But “I’m scared you-know-what-less at the prospect, so I’d do the bare minimum and get out as soon as possible” doesn’t play as well as “the people elected a Republican, so that’s what I’ll give them.”
I’m not Carl Albert, I don’t propose to speak for him, and for all I know he could mean what he said. But if it were me, I’d use any excuse to get out as quickly as possible while not causing people to rethink letting me keep my current job in the House. Nobody’s going to vote for a Speaker who publicly shuns their Constitutional obligations.
Albert said that when Nixon was sounding out the house leadership on a possible VP, they didn’t give him a choice: they said he should take Ford. That, from a Democratic Speaker.
So strange that you would say this when the news was abuzz about Trump firing the acting Attorney General just a few weeks ago.
Nixon was TOLD he’d be convicted. Barry Goldwater led the House and Senate Republican Leaders into the Oval Office and told Nixon his impeachment and conviction were a sure bet. I mean, that’s kind of the final word right there.
It’s not the least bit strange.
The odd exception doesn’t invalidate the rule, regardless of how recent it was.
Go through historically and find how many DC officials left their posts. Then find out how many resigned and how many were fired. You’ll see for yourself that the percentage of the latter is negligible–even more so when you dig deeper and realize that a percentage of the “firings” were actually resignations. The big one that comes to mind immediately is when Walter Scheib left the White House Chef job and all the headlines screamed that he was fired, but buried in the article that he actually resigned.
In DC, a resignation isn’t necessarily voluntary, but it’s how a very solid majority will leave their jobs unless you give your boss a reason to make an example of you.
Not exactly. Johnson’s point was that he should not be forced to keep advisors chosen by someone else (Lincoln) and that he should be allowed to pick his own. This argument worked as the Tenure of Office Act specified a Cabinet member must be kept until the end of the term and Johnson’s legal team argued the term that protected Stanton ended with Lincoln’s death and many Senators agreed with him.
It was Myers v. United States that (indirectly) made the TOA [now repealed] unconstitutional based on your argument.