Did Biden Get It Wrong? You Betcha

Monday, October 06, 2008
By John R. Lott, Jr.


When you interview for a job, here is a hint: make sure you know what the job is. Joe Biden failed that test last Thursday. He couldn?t even get right what a vice president does, but the media didn?t notice.
The media is all over itself about how smart and experienced Biden is. Political analyst Charlie Cook is quoted in the Washington Post on Saturday as saying ?Biden is clearly so much more knowledgeable, by a factor of about a million.? Saturday Night Live does a skit about Biden being smart, if slimy. Meanwhile, Governor Sarah Palin is treated as being nothing more than a simpleton.
Yet, take Biden?s statement from the debate on the role of the vice president:
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.

And 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. 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.
One should be careful when throwing around terms such as ?most dangerous? and ?bizarre.? But Biden is confusing which part of the Constitution covers the Executive Branch (it is Article II, not Article I). More importantly, the notion that the vice president can preside over the Senate only when there is a tie vote is simply wrong. Nor is it true that the only legislative involvement the vice president has is to break tie votes. The vice president is the president of the Senate, where he interprets the rules and can only be overridden by a vote of 60 senators.
Early vice presidents spent a lot of time in the Senate. Thomas Jefferson even spent his time writing ?A Manual of Parliamentary Practice: for the Use of the Senate of the United States.? Modern vice presidents may show up only when they think tie votes will occur, but that is their choice.
This isn?t rocket science. The Constitution on this point is very straightforward: ?The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.?
Instead, it was Palin who got it right. Besides correctly stating that the vice president holds positions in both the executive and legislative branches, she also noted that:
Of course, we know what a vice president does. And that's not only to preside over the Senate and [I] will take that position very seriously also. I'm thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president if that vice president so chooses to exert it in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president's policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are.
But just as the vice president?s job includes more than simply being ready to assume the presidency if the president dies, the Constitution merely states what the vice president?s minimum responsibilities are.
Compare the uproar over Palin?s answer to Charlie Gibson about the ?Bush Doctrine,? a doctrine that Gibson clearly didn?t understand and for which there apparently exist at least four different versions. Where is the outrage over Biden not understanding what vice presidents do? For Biden, his inability to correctly say what vice presidents do was surely his ?gotcha? moment.
Yet, this mistake during the debate was hardly unique. Biden got a lot of things wrong in the debate that are going unnoticed by the fact-check media. Take just a few:
Unfortunately, voters who are trying to get an accurate count on whether the candidates are telling the truth can?t rely on the media. FactCheck.org mentions only one of these points, the size of the Iraqi surplus. The Washington Post mentioned Biden?s misstatement on Hamas and Katie?s restaurant. AOL?s coverage of the errors in the vice presidential debate was by far the worst, though that might not be too surprising given that Tommy Christopher, who wrote their news analysis, also blogs on the Obama Web site. None of these checkers mentioned Biden's statements about the role of the vice president.
Compare this to the attacks on Sarah Palin:
What Palin actually said was: ?Now, Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians.? Whether one believes the AP estimate or not, the question is whether she was accurately characterizing Obama?s statement of the job that our forces were doing. And Obama said, ?We?ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we?re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians? (emphasis added).
The media seems to have been covering for Biden for some time. While news stories still talk about Dan Quayle?s spelling mistake 18 years later, there has been almost no news coverage of Biden?s numerous wacky statements. What if Quayle had said something similar to Biden?s recent statement that, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'" A neat trick given that Herbert Hoover was president in 1929 and no one was watching television.
It might not fit the simple template for a 36-year veteran of the Senate to not understand what vice presidents do (after all, eight vice presidents have served with him), but Biden knew less about this than the political outsider, Sarah Palin. Given that they are running to be vice president