They didn't think much about the Supreme Court either. As an after thought the SC was given an office in the capital building that had been a closet area.
Why should John Edwards or anyone else want to be vice president? One of the men who held the post spoke of it as "the most insignificant office" ever contrived by the wit of man, and the men who wittingly contrived it — I mean, of course, the Framers of the Constitution — may have been of the same opinion. At least, they said nothing whatever about the qualifications of those who were to hold the office; unlike presidents and members of the House and Senate, vice presidents — so far as the Constitution is concerned — may be of any age and any nationality.
Source: Walter Berns is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
No qualifications for the office of Vice-President? It amazes me that 'constitutional scholars' continue to put out this misinformation, when the body of his own article refutes this contention. First, what does the Constitution say about the requirements to be eligible to hold the Office of President? Here is the relevant text:
Article II, Section 1:
"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."
Now before the ratification of the 12th Amendment, no one formally ran for the Office of Vice-President; everyone was running for the Office of President, there was no mechanism in place to even run FOR the Office of Vice-President, as it was the "booby-prize" embedded in the Constitution... So that meant that anyone who became Vice-President had to meet all of the Constitutional qualifications for the Office of President, since that was the only Office for which the election was held. This is how Thomas Jefferson ended up being Vice-President to his adversary John Adams(2) when he became President in the election of 1796. John Adams(2) got 71 electoral votes, Thomas Jefferson got 68 electoral votes and the majority requirement was 70 electoral votes to become President. Jefferson came in second and became Vice-President.
So we DO have Constitutional requirements for anyone to hold the Office of Vice-President, they are identical to those of the Office of President since potential election to that Office was the gateway to the Office of Vice-President. Now what about the 12th Amendment which changed the electoral system from each elector having two votes for President to having one vote for President and one vote for Vice-President? Did this Amendment change, re-define or even ignore the requirements for the Office of Vice-President? Here is the last paragraph of the 12th Amendment to the Constitution:
Amendment 12:
"The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two- thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."
The ratification of the 12th Amendment did nothing to modify the original Constitutional eligibility requirements for the Office of President, or the identical ones for the Office of Vice-President. However, to make sure that the new method of filling the Office of Vice-President did not allow for even the slightest chance that ambiguity might cloud the issue in the future, the final sentence in the 12th Amendment nails down the Vice-Presidential eligibility requirements: they are identical to those of the Office of President.
Case closed.
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