Article 1, Section 3, Clause 4: President of the Senate

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

This clause establishes the Vice-President as President of the Senate, and gives him the power to break tie votes in the Senate. As of late 2018, the Vice-President has broken a tie vote 268 times.

Since Article 1, Section 3, Clause 1 established that there would be two Senators per state, each with an independent vote, it was likely that there would be occasional tie votes.  The Framers ensured that ties would always be broken in the Senate by giving the Vice President the power to break ties. The question naturally arises why no similar provision is spelled out for the House, where a tie vote is equivalent to defeat of the measure voted on.

Three answers come to mind.

The first is that the Framers saw a greater need for decisiveness for the Senate than the House. This seems unlikely, since there is no fundamental difficulty with regarding a tie vote as equivalent to defeat, as is the case with the House.

The second is that the Framers, anticipating that the Vice-President would likely be a political rival of the President under the original mode of election, meant to bias the Senate away from the President as a check on the latter’s powers. And, in fact, Thomas Jefferson ruthlessly exercised his powers as President of the Senate to thwart the policies of his rival, John Adams, then serving as President. The bitterness this engendered resulted in passage of the Twelfth Amendment, which essentially guaranteed that the President and Vice-President would no longer be political rivals. We believe this was an example of hard cases making bad law; or, put another way, of a politician bringing into disrepute a fundamentally sound constitutional principle through his abuse of it, a pattern we see repeated again and again in U.S. history.

The third answer, which has considerable support in the historical record, is that the Framers were simply seeking some meaningful role to assign to the Vice-President. As we shall examine in greater depth when we come to Article 2, the office of Vice-President was largely an afterthought. It first came up very late in the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention, and mostly in connection with the mode of election of the President. The Framer’s thinking in this area was subtle and likely surprising to most modern readers. The Vice-President was originally a kind of “first runner-up” in the election of the President, with no other constitutional role than to act in place of the President should the President resign, be removed, or die in office. Making the Vice-President the President of the Senate gave him an additional role to act as the leader of the legislative branch, with his power to break ties making this not quite a ceremonial role. Many early Vice-Presidents saw it that way, but that perception rapidly deteriorated, particularly after the passage of the 12th Amendment, and for about a century (~1830-1930) the Vice-Presidency was an almost completely obscure and powerless office that usually drowned the political ambitions of the unhappy souls that held it. The modern conception of Vice-President as chief advisor and legislative liaison for the President is almost entirely a post-1930 phenomenon.