The Vice Président in The United States

Extract

[...] The election of the Vice President would then be impossible and the choice of Vice President would be given to the Senate. In practice, this is rarely a problem, as political parties avoid tickets with two candidates from the same state. Nevertheless, because of this constitutional constraint, Dick Cheney had to move to Texas to become president. He, then, had to return to his first home to be the Republican vice-presidential candidate to George W. Bush, the presidential candidate and governor of Texas. [...]

[...] We cannot strictly compare the VP to the Prime Minister on this point. Finally, in France the prime minister is in charge of the government and of the administration during that the president is in charge of the executive function. On the contrary, in the US the president is in charge of the administration and that's the reason why he has a great power of nomination (and revocation in practice). B. Vice president and French senate president Secondly, it can be noticed that, thanks to the legal regime the vice- president and the president of the Senate in France are close in terms of replacement rules. [...]

[...] The vice president is elected by the same electoral college which votes for the president of the US at the same time. Both are elected for four years. Since one thousand eight hundred four and more particularly since the adoption of the 12th amendment, the vote for the election of the president and the one for the vice president is done by separated ballot papers. Before that, the VP was elected by the person who arrived second in terms of numbers of votes concerning the presidential election. [...]

[...] But the VP has not only a potential decisive vote in the senate. There is also a legal proximity to the president. We can read this in the first section of the 20th amendment. Difficult comparison with the French system to better understand the singularity of the Vice-presidency function A. Vice president and French prime minister The VP function is unique even if some mechanisms can be similar to the French ones. First able, while France is a unitary State, the USA is a federal State or those systems are radically different so the comparison between their organs seems quite difficult. [...]

[...] The electoral practice made the electors vote for a given president and VP elected by their political party. In this way, while the US constitution considers that the president and the VP are chosen separately, in practice they are chosen together. There is a special case about the American election: if there is no candidate for the vice presidency who gets a majority of votes by the electors, according to the US constitution, the senate proceeds to its election. This case happened only once in history in one thousand eight hundred thirty-six, when Richard Mentor Johnson was elected by the senate. [...]