The Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City, as pictured September 26, 2023 (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent).
Next month, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, and Mike Kehoe will be inaugurated as the 58th governor of Missouri.
JD Vance will be inaugurated as the 50th vice president and David Wasinger will be inaugurated as Missouri’s 49th lieutenant governor.
Many people are familiar with the responsibilities of presidents and governors, but what do vice presidents and lieutenant governors do?
The role of vice president is only mentioned in the U.S. Constitution a handful of times.
Article I, Section 3 says that the vice president “shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote” except in the event of a tie. Historically, ties have been rare. Since 1789, only 301 tie-breaking votes have been cast, and 12 vice presidents have never cast a single one.
The beginning of Article II, Section 1 explains how vice presidents are elected, which was later revised by the 12th Amendment. The end of that section states that presidential power “shall devolve on the Vice President” in the event of the president’s, “Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office.”
As written, it is unclear whether this meant that a vice president became the new president or was simply serving in an acting capacity. This was later clarified with the passage of the 25th Amendment, which states that “the Vice President shall become President.”
The 25th Amendment also outlines how to fill a vacancy in the vice presidency, and it provides a mechanism for the vice president to temporarily serve as president if a president becomes “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Finally, Article II, Section 4 states that vice presidents, like presidents, can be “removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
So, other than staying out of trouble to avoid impeachment and waiting around to serve as — or replace — the president, vice presidents are really only obligated to occasionally cast a tiebreaking vote in the Senate. This means that the great majority of the time, vice presidents have no real job to do.
Furthermore, many presidents go out of their way to keep their vice presidents an arm’s length away, even on key matters. Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, kept the atomic bomb a secret from Vice President Harry S. Truman, who didn’t find out about it until Roosevelt’s death.
For the 1960 presidential election, Vice President Richard Nixon faced off against Senator John F. Kennedy. At one point during the campaign, reporters asked then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Can you think of a major contribution that Nixon has made to your administration?” Eisenhower replied: “Well, if you give me a week I might think of one.”
John Adams, the first U.S. vice president, complained that the vice presidency was “the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived.” However, not all have been upset by such inactivity. Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, Thomas Marshall, teased that after retiring he didn’t want to work anymore, but he “wouldn’t mind being Vice President again.”
At the state level, lieutenant governors perform a role similar to vice presidents — which is to say they are not obligated to do much. The daily responsibilities of a lieutenant governor have sometimes been jokingly characterized as “get up, read the paper, see if the governor is dead, if not, go back to sleep”.
In Missouri, the lieutenant governor has more to do than that, but they still only have a few constitutionally mandated responsibilities. In addition to becoming governor upon the death, conviction, impeachment or resignation of the governor, the lieutenant governor can temporarily serve as governor when the governor is absent from the state or is incapacitated.
Also, the lieutenant governor gets to vote in the Missouri Senate in the event of a tie.
While each of those duties are important, they do not come up very frequently, which calls into question how necessary lieutenant governors really are. For what it is worth, there are five states that do not have the position of lieutenant governor: Arizona, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Wyoming.
In two states, Tennessee and West Virginia, the position of lieutenant governor is not directly elected. Rather, the title of “lieutenant governor” is assigned to whomever is the president of the state senate.
In the remaining 43 states, there is both a position of lieutenant governor elected by voters. Twenty-six of those states elect their governor and lieutenant governor as a team, similar to how the president and vice president are elected. The remaining 17 states, which includes Missouri, elect their governor and lieutenant governor in separate races, and as such, they may be from different political parties.
Former Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, for instance, was a Democrat, while the lieutenant governor during his tenure, Peter Kinder, was a Republican.
Although vice presidents and lieutenant governors do not get much attention, the positions do often provide a launching pad for higher office. 15 vice presidents have later become president, the most recent of which was Joe Biden, who served as vice president under Barrack Obama. Similarly, several lieutenant governors have later become governor.
For example, after a scandal-plagued Eric Greitens resigned from the governor’s office in 2018, Lt. Gov. Mike Parson became governor. Parson then appointed Kehoe to serve as lieutenant governor. When Kehoe decided to run for governor, he was endorsed by Parson.
Vance and Wasinger may not end up doing much as vice president and lieutenant governor. However, if history is any guide, the new occupants of these two seemingly insignificant offices now stand a good chance of one day becoming president and governor.