I realize that this is a highly unlikely and improbable scenario, but how freaky would it be to have Romney as president and Biden as VP? How would that work, if it happened? I realize that the VP doesn’t have a large role in our current government, but presidents use VPs to do a lot of the scruffy work, making speeches and sometimes launching trial balloons for things they want to test out. What would Biden do as Romney’s VP?? :eek:
I’ve thought about that. I suspect Biden wouldn’t even want the position … but maybe I’m wrong. I don’t see much upside in it for him.
I imagine Romney would just use his Secretary of State to do most of the stuff the VP does, and Biden would go hang out somewhere and wait for the off chance that Romney dies.
Romney/Biden and a tied Senate would be extra exciting.
The upside is that his party would get the Presidency if Romney goes to Kolob at some point in the next four years. And he would get a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. And it wouldn’t really cost him anything, the VP doesn’t really have to do anything.
(plus its an easy paycheck for Biden, who IIRC was relatively poor, by Senator standards anyways)
See Simplicio’s post…that’s what would be in it for Biden (and the Dems) if this actually happened. They would get this for a single term anyway (obviously Romney would dump Biden during his re-election), though it would be hilarious if it happened again, and again Biden got to cast the deciding vote for himself to remain as a third term VP (I assume there is no term limit on VP).
Jason Sudeikis would have to work in split-screen.
I guess there’s that. I should’ve said that I don’t see any net upside:
I imagine it’d make him look like a power-hungry prick that didn’t have the good sense to concede when his side lost and his do-anything-for-power attitude left us with a disfunctional executive branch to most Americans, but who knows …
Not sure how a tie in the electoral college would be “his side loosing”. And I don’t see how it would make the Executive Branch “dysfunctional”, the VP doesn’t have any Executive powers. Biden wouldn’t have anything to do with the Executive Branch that Romney didn’t want him to do, so long as Romney was still breathing.
I would try not to be alone with Biden though if I were Romney…
I think it would make for an amazing sitcom!
Mitt is rich! Joe is poor! Mitt’s an elitist capitalist! Joe rides the train to work every day. Mitt is the most powerful man in the country; Joe is just one heartbeat away from being their himself! Both of them can’t talk for 5 minutes without saying something incredibly stupid or untrue!!!
Well, in Obama country we’ve certainly seen denial and then anger. I was curious as to what form bargaining might possibly come, but I admit I wasn’t expecting this.
Together, they fight crime.
There are some here who argue quite strenuously that the Vice President is in charge of the Senate.
It would be Adams/Jefferson all over again.
More of a GQ, but is there any particular reason the founding fathers didn’t have the foresight to have an odd number of electoral votes?
They did, but the 23rd Amendment messed that up by giving DC 3 electoral votes, making the total even.
Thanks. But, then is there any particular reason that the 23rd Amendment didn’t account for this and reapportion one extra or one fewer vote somewhere in the country? Is it just 49 states digging in and not wanting one other state to even have that tiny minimal extra vote?
A 269-269 tie and a split ticket is almost always theoretically possible. I always find this kind of idle speculation in the news media annoying. Real issues go uncovered, but people find time to write about this wacky stuff.
Similar speculation from 2008: An Electoral College Doomsday?
And here you can find someone considering the possibility in 2004. Along with an SDMB thread.
Together, they fight crime!
The odd/even parity of electoral votes depended on the odd/even parity of the House of Representatives, and the framers correctly recognized that any attempt to freeze the number of representatives in 1787 would be folly. The country was growing like a weed and it was obvious that many new states would be admitted over time.
Early House reappotionment acts ignored odd/even parity, and often resulted in an even number of House members and thus EC votes. Nobody cared. The parity was further scrambled when new states were admitted between censuses. It was random. Some elections had an even number of electoral votes; some had odd.
Finally in 1912 Congress set the size of the House at 435 members, and odd parity was fixed. This was the happy situation which prevailed until the DC electoral votes. The DC electoral votes fix opposite parity between the House and the EC, and we can’t fix one without disturbing the other. Personally I think House parity is more important.
Maureen Dowd mused about such a scenario in her column today. As the race gets closer, Biden (and Obama) should poke fun at this scenario.