Dick Cheney’s legacy is inevitably going to be the powerful vice-presidency. Prior to his administration the VP has been the ultimate-non-job. Cheney made it the most powerful unelected position in the world. I say unelected because there is no real sense in which the American Voters elected him.  The elder Bush, in his selection of Dan Qayle as his running mate, pretty much proved that it doesn’t matter who the VP candidate is. The people elect the president, every one else in the administration including the VP comes along on the presidents coattails.  One could argue that Cheney made the perfect coup. With a gullible and manipulable president, with good name recognition, and chummy demeanor and the brains of a gnat, Cheney was able to grab and hold on to the actual power without troubling himself with the niceties of democracy.

It seems enormously unlikely that any future VP is going to sit on his hands and watch the president, so I propose that we take advantage of  Cheney’s initiative by establishing a real job for the VP, but first I propose an amendment that go backwards. Backwards that is to the original US Constitution

The candidate who is elected Vice President shall be the candidate for President for whom the total number of votes cast by the people is the second highest.

This pretty much guarantees that the VP will be opposed to the president. With our incumbent two-party system, it pretty much guarantees that the VP will come from other party.

So let’s give this adversarial VP a job:

The VP shall have no executive decision making powers but shall be entitled to participate in all communications in which the President participates or is entitled to participate.

What does this do for the people? It guarantees that there is someone who is has all the same information as the president.

One of the problems I felt in the run up to the Iraq war, and which appeared to be the problem that others had, was that we had cause to believe that the President was the best informed person in the world. He had access to information that we did not and could not. He had spent billions of dollars (of our money) on intelligence services to make sure that he has informed, and so when something about Iraq and WMDs we could, and perhaps should, and unfortunately did, assume that he knew better than anyone else, and that the information he had might reasonably and sensibly be necessary kept secret. We had no how to know that the President was clueless, making it up or just lieing.

The adversarial VP becomes the peoples’ check and balance in the executive branch. We should be able to know that he knows exactly the same as the president. We know that the adversarial VP can, and presumably will, maintain a secret that the country’s security depends on, but will not maintain a secret whose purpose is to convert up corruption or incompetence or willful lying from the White House.

The adversarial VP will be trusted by most Americans who don’t trust the President and so force the White House to be trustworthy.

Curiously if the constitution forces full disclosure of all information shared with the President it takes the President out of party politics. The president’s party could scheme to get him re-elected but it would be extremely hard for the president to be involved. Personally I think that would be a good thing. I’d prefer to the see president involved with running the country and get re-elected on the basis of how well he does it, but then I feel that politic parties are, in general, the greatest danger there is to government by the people.