During the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate between Democratic candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Republican candidate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Vance claimed multiple times that Vice President Kamala Harris could have already done the things she is promising to do if elected president. Vance referred to President Joe Biden’s administration as the “Kamala Harris Administration” in an attempt to paint Biden as mentally incompetent and Harris as the proverbial “shot caller” of the administration. The obvious goal of Vance’s tactic was to assign any shortcomings or failures of the Biden administration to Harris and to shoot down as dishonest anything new she promises to do as president.
I’m a college student at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., and immediately after the debate, I was asked by MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff what I made of Vance’s remarks. My response went viral: “If anybody took high school civics class they’d know what the vice president can do and what the vice president can’t do,” I said. “Neither candidate on that stage talked about what executive action they’re gonna take on Day One to do what they want, nor were they asked. Because they know that they can’t. That’s not how the vice presidency works. You don’t get to do what you want — you do what the president delegates you to do.”
The roles of the vice president are spelled out in the Constitution, the founding document that Republicans like to say they base their policies on but don’t always appear to have read.
- Article II, Section I: “In case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President.”
- Article I, Section 3: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote unless they are equally divided.”
There are additional provisions in the 12th, 22nd, and 25th Amendments that provide instances in which the vice president may ascend to the presidency. But you won’t find any examples of the person serving as vice president using their power to sign legislation or set the policy agenda for an administration — because that’s not what they do. While vice presidents do serve as advisers to the president, they don’t make the policy decisions. They are, however, expected to publicly defend the decisions of the president — even if they disagree with them.
So why do Vance and Donald Trump, the top of the Republican ticket, insist on this rhetoric? An obvious reason is that the Trump campaign had all of these attacks prepared to use against President Joe Biden and wasn’t prepared when he withdrew from the race. They’re stuck, then, trying to pin all of Biden’s decisions on Harris even if — as I told Soboroff — no one who’s taken a high school civics class believes she made those decisions. She is a part of the Biden administration, and it’s fair to associate her with the successes and failures of the administration, but it’s an insult to our intelligence to argue, as Trump and Vance are doing, that she could have already done as vice president everything she says she wants to do as president. College students such as myself not only want to see a campaign based on the issues — and not on the character attacks, hateful rhetoric and fearmongering that the Trump campaign keeps using — but we also want to see a campaign that’s based on facts and not obvious lies. For the first time in our history, a Black and Asian American woman is a major party’s nominee for president of the United States. As soon as Biden announced he was abandoning his campaign and Harris stepped into the role as Democratic nominee, I knew there’d be an unfair double standard placed on her and that she’d have to deal with things that no other candidates (with the possible exceptions of Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton) had to deal with, but I didn’t expect that she’d be expected to fend off attacks that most teenagers would recognize as bogus. We all deserve better than that. The United States of America deserves better than that.
Marcus Johnson
Marcus Johnson is a political science major at Oakland University where he serves as the Speaker of the Legislature for the University Student Congress. He is passionate about advocacy and representation on behalf of Oakland University students and the larger world. His future plans include either law school or a job in politics. 
