Talk:List of the Presidents of the United States Senate

Untitled

The following is a closed discussion. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this section.

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This article is about Presiding Officers of the U.S. Senate, which is either the Vice President (who, ex officio, is the President of the Senate) or the President Pro Tempore of the Senate when there is no acting Vice President (because the VP has died or resigned, or is acting, in either a temporary or permanent capacity, as President of the U.S.). The list includes PPTs who became presiding officers of the Senate in each instance in which there was a permanent vacancy in the Vice Presidency (such as when VPs Clinton, Gerry, King, Sherman, etc. died, or VPs Calhoun and Agnew resigned, or when VPs Tyler, A. Johnson, Arthur, T. Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman, L. Johnson and Ford acceded to the Presidency), even when the vacancy was brief (such as after Calhoun's resignation, Sherman's death, Agnew's resignation and Ford's accession to the presidency), and even when the PPT served for only a day or two. It may sound like a technicality, but when President Reagan invoked the 25th Amendment to cede power temporarily to VP GHW Bush in 1985 during a colonoscopy that required sedation, and President GW Bush did the same under similar circumstances to give power temporarily to VP Cheney in 2002 and 2007, there was a temporary vacancy in the vice presidency (that only ended up lasting a couple of hours in each case, since the President invoked the 25th Amendment again to return to power as soon as the sedation wore off) and the PPT automatically became the presiding officer of the Senate during such time period. If we're going to be consistent, I think that we need to include Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd as the presiding officer of the Senate during those two-hour periods in 1985 and 2002 and 2007, respectively.

By the way, if the title of the article is creating confusion, maybe we should change the name to "Presiding Officers of the U.S. Senate." AuH2ORepublican (talk) 03:16, 4 July 2010 (UTC) ~~

Even though Bush & Cheney couldn't peforms their duties as VPOTUS/Pres of the Senate, while filling in as Acting US Presidnet. They were still VPOTUS/Pres of the Senate, while filling in as Acting US President. GoodDay (talk) 14:19, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, a Vice President acting as U.S. President pursuant to the 25th Amendment is still the Vice President, but he cannot be called the President of the Senate while acting as U.S. President because not only would it be a violation of Separation of Powers (one man can't be both the President of the Senate and the President of the United States simultaneously), but it is specifically prohibited by Art. I, sec. 3, cl. 5 of the Constitution. Had Dick Cheney shown up at the Capitol at a time in which he was Acting President pursuant to the 25th Amendment, he would have been constitutionally prohibited from presiding over the Senate because, while acting as President, he was not the President of the Senate. This has never occurred in real life. but something similar occurred at the end of Advise & Consent, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Allen Drury and 1962 movie directed by Otto Preminger (and starring Henry Fonda and Charles Laughton), in which the Vice President was constitutionally prohibited from casting a tie-breaking vote because, as he was informed by the Senate Chaplain, the President had just died.

AuH2ORepublican (talk) 15:23, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

According to Article I, the Vice President of the US is President of the Senate. Even though Bush & Cheney were no longer discharging their powers/duties as Pres of the Senate for those few hours, they were still Pres of the Senate, regardless. GoodDay (talk) 15:36, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a discussion. Please do not modify it. Future discussions and edit requests should take place at Talk:List of Vice Presidents of the United States. No further edits should be made to this section.

Purpose

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Absolutely no disrespect to the creator of this article or those who are Senate fanatics, but I am having troubling seeing what the purpose of this article is; if not the purpose of this article, then the purpose of the length of this article. The President of the Senate is always the Vice President, unless there is temporarily no Vice President, of course. Therefore, why are all Presidents of the Senate/Vice Presidents named? Should there not be only be a few sentences articulating that the Constitution states that the President of the Senate is the Vice President? GnarlyLikeWhoa (talk) 00:45, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a discussion. Please do not modify it. Future discussions and edit requests should take place at Talk:List of Vice Presidents of the United States. No further edits should be made to this section.

Proposal to Change Name of Article to "List of Presiding Officers of the United States Senate"

The following is a closed discussion. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this section.

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While it is true that the sitting Vice President of the United States is, ex officio, the President of the United States Senate, it does not follow that the list of Presidents of the United States Senate is identical to the list of Vice Presidents of the United States. This is due to the numerous times in U.S. history in which there has not been a sitting Vice President and thus the President Pro Tempore of the Senate becomes the new President of the Senate (unless there simultaneously is a vacancy in the office of the President Pro Tempore, in which case the office of the Presidency of the Senate remains vacant until a Vice President of the United States or a President Pro Tempore of the Senate is appointed or elected. There have been 22 occasions in which there was no Vice President of the United States, during the following periods of time:

(i) after the First U.S. Congress met in its initial session but prior to John Adams being sworn in as VP on April 21, 1789 (during which 15-day period John Langdon served as the first President of the U.S. Senate);

(ii) from the date of death or resignation of a Vice President of the United States until the next Vice President is sworn in (be it after election or, since ratification of the 25th Amendment, upon appointment and congressional ratification), which occurred in 1812 (lasting 10 and 1/2 months), 1814 (lasting over 2 years and 3 months), 1832 (lasting over 2 months), 1853 (lasting 3 years and 10 and 1/2 months), 1875 (lasting 1 year and 3 and 1/2 months), 1885 (lasting over 3 years and 3 months), 1899 (lasting 1 year and 3 and 1/2 months), 1912 (lasting over 4 months) and 1973 (lasting 2 months);

(iii) from the date of death or resignation of a President of the United States (at which time the Vice President automatically becomes President of the United States and the office of the Vice Presidency becomes vacant) until the next Vice President is sworn in (be it after election or, since ratification of the 25th Amendment, upon appointment and congressional ratification), which occurred in 1841 (lasting 3 years and 11 months), 1850 (lasting 2 years and 8 months), 1865 (lasting 3 years and 11 months), 1881 (lasting 3 years and 5 and 1/2 months), 1901 (lasting 3 years and 6 and 1/2 months), 1923 (lasting 1 year and 7 months), 1945 (lasting 3 years and 9 months), 1963 (lasting 1 year and 2 months) and 1974 (lasting over 4 months); and

(iv) from the date on which a Vice President of the United States becomes Acting President pursuant to an invocation of the 25th Amendment by the President of the United States to declare temporary incapacity to serve as President until the time that such temporary incapacity has ended, which occurred in 1985, 2002 and 2007 and each lasting just a few hours.

In the aggregate, there has been no Vice President of the United States for a period of 38 years of the 227 years of the U.S. Senate's existence (over one-sixth of the time). Thirty different Presidents Pro Tempore have served as official President of the Senate during vacancies in the Vice Presidency, and some of them served as President of the Senate on more than one occasion. It thus is incorrect to state that a page listing the Vice Presidents of the United States is an adequate substitute for a page that lists the Presidents of the Senates and their terms in such office. Just as there's a page listing Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives, it is important that readers have available a page that lists Presidents of the U.S. Senate.

Of course, some will say that the title "President of the Senate" should be reserved for the Vice President because the U.S. Constitution provides that "[t]he Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate...." However, when there is a vacancy in the Vice Presidency, the Constitution does not condemn the Senate not to have a President; in fact, the Constitution specifically empowers the Senate to elect a President Pro Tempore to serve upon the Vice President's absence. Given that when there is a vacancy in the Vice President such "absence" is not merely incidental, it follows that, when there is no Vice President, the President Pro Tempore becomes the President of the Senate.

But we're talking about semantics. The names and dates of service as the presiding officer of the U.S, Senate is important and valuable information, and the article should not be deleted, and its information no longer made available, merely because it offends some people to refer to the President Pro Tempore as the "President of the Senate" during such time periods in which there is no Vice President of the United States (orvwhen the VP is legally incapable of acting as President of the Senate, such as when he is acting as President of the United States. So I hereby propose that, to avoid controversy or confusion, the article's title be changed to "List of Presiding Officers of the United States Senate." That way, the information contained therein still will be available to readers, but the title of "President of the Senate" would not be used to describe a President Pro Tempore during a period in which the Vice Presidency is vacant.

What say all of you? AuH2ORepublican (talk) 04:18, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

As "Presiding Officer" is a role, not an actual office, would you include all persons who have ever presided over the U.S. Senate on the list? If not, then changing the title won't change the facts pointed out to you by myself and others above about this list. This List of Presidents of the United States Senate simply replicates information found on the List of Vice Presidents of the United States page and, to a lesser extent, the List of Presidents pro tempore of the United States Senate page. Simply changing the name doesn't change the reasons why this page should be redirected. So, are you contemplating more then a cosmetic name change here? Drdpw (talk) 17:49, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

What I am trying to do is to stop the elimination of an article that is an important source of information. There have been 30 different persons to serve as President of the Senate while there either was a vacancy in the Vice Presidency or the VP was acting as President of the United States, and three other periods in which there was a vacancy in both the Vice Presidency and in the Presidency pro tempore of the Senate. It is simply not correct to say that the article replicates the list of Vice Presidents of the United States, unless "replicates" is taken to mean "includes the same 47 names but also has 40 other names of persons serving as President of the Senate for a period comprising, in the aggregate, 38 years." As the customer in the Monty Python sketch replied when offered a slug in exchange for the dead parrot that they sold him, "it's not a bloody substitute then, is it?"

I care about the information in the article, not the article per se, much less its title. If changing the title to "List of Presiding Officers of the U.S. Senate" is acceptable, then count me in, but if the proposed title is not acceptable (which appears to be the case) then I withdraw my proposal. Given that my interest is in keeping the information available, not necessarily to keep it as a stand-alone article, I would not have a problem with the article's contents being transferred to another article (say, the article on the Presiding Officer of the United States Senate) and becoming a new section therein (maybe one that is "hidden" and one must click on it to "show" it), so long as people searching for the original article are redirected to the new location of the information. I just don't want the information in the article, which I and many others use for reference, to be flushed down the memory hole and become unavailable. AuH2ORepublican (talk) 18:20, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

You make a good case for adding a section to the Presiding Officer of the United States Senate article. It is important for readers to know that on 3 occasions since 1789, there was neither a President nor President pro-tempore of the Senate (Who did preside over the Senate during these interim periods would need to be stated), and that on 2 occasions the Chief Justice of the U.S. presided during a presidential impeachment trial. Have you considered producing such a section? This would be a better course of action then simply transferring the existing list to the presiding officer page, unless it were expanded into a complete list of all persons who have presided over the U.S. Senate. Cheers. Drdpw (talk) 20:02, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Sorry this is a few months after the fact. Only the Vice President of the United States is President of the Senate. Anyone other than the VP is President pro tempore, acting president pro tempore, or presiding officer. There doesn't have to be a President of the Senate at any given moment - the highest-ranking official of the Senate could be a Senator presiding in the VP's absence, but they don't get the title President of the Senate. JTRH (talk) 00:17, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

@AuH2ORepublican:@JTRH:@GoodDay: In preparation for redirecting this page, I've taken steps to ensure that the unique information in the list is not lost by adding material to the Presiding Officer of the United States Senate and President pro tempore of the United States Senate articles and the List of Presidents pro tempore of the United States Senate. Please, take a look, and if you find that I've missed anything, please address it by editing the appropriate page. Regards. Drdpw (talk) 19:09, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

@Drdpw:@JTRH:@GoodDay: Thank you for the heads-up. I have added the list of presiding officers of the Senate (VPs or, if there's a vacancy in the VP or if the VP temporarily may not carry out his duties, the PPT) that appeared in the stand-alone article being deleted. I tried unsuccessfully to include the list as "hidden text" that would require the reader to click on an "unhide" button to view it; I think that you all are more skilled at this type of thing than I am, so I would appreciate it if you could convert the new section to "hidden text" so that those who are not interested in the information do not need to slog through it to get to the bottom of the page. Best regards. AuH2ORepublican (talk) 20:44, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

According to the US Constitution, the Vice President of the United States is President of the United States Senate. It doesn't mention any other official. This article should be re-directed to Vice President of the United States, as a result. GoodDay (talk) 19:18, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a discussion. Please do not modify it. Future discussions and edit requests should take place at Talk:List of Vice Presidents of the United States. No further edits should be made to this section.

Constitutional ambiguity

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It is not clear from the language of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment that the Vice President stops being Vice President (and thereby President of the Senate) while serving as Acting President. While it would seem to be intuitive that simultaneously exercising executive (Acting POTUS) and legislative (President of the Senate) authority would violate separation of powers, the Constitution doesn't provide that "Vice President" and "Acting President" are mutually exclusive. Unlike an officer such as the Speaker of the House, the VP doesn't have to resign as VP to become Acting President. None of the short-term invocations of the disability provisions of the Twenty-Fifth have resulted in a VP being Acting President while the Senate was in session, so the provisions have never been tested in practice. So I would argue that it isn't definitive that, for example, Robert Byrd qualifies to be on this list because Cheney was Acting POTUS for a few hours each in 2002 and 2007. Specifically, it's not clear that Cheney's tenure as Vice President was interrupted. And if Cheney didn't stop being VP, then Byrd didn't step up to be the highest official of the Senate because he was President pro tem. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm saying it's unclear. JTRH (talk) 23:54, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a discussion. Please do not modify it. Future discussions and edit requests should take place at Talk:List of Vice Presidents of the United States. No further edits should be made to this section.