The Vice President Is More Than Just a Running Mate We are nearing the end of the season of the Great Mentioning, with murmurs of a vice presidential pick by Mitt Romney in the next few weeks, and possibly sooner. Will it be Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal or Rob Portman? Or maybe Condoleezza Rice, despite her consistent declarations that she has no interest? The media, and to some extent the public, are focused on who Romney will choose. A better question is: what is Romney's vision for the office of the vice president, and how does his running mate plan to exercise the enormous powers of that office? If you watched the recent HBO comedy series "Veep," you might conclude that vision and expectations don't matter because the vice president is an irrelevant player in the governing game, or relevant only for comedic purposes. Indeed, Vice President Biden has contributed from time to time to the image of the vice presidency as a source of entertainment. The image of the vice president as comic relief is as old as the republic. The first vice president, John Adams, famously described the job as "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived" while the official Senate Web site describes the vice presidency as the "least understood, most ridiculed, and most often ignored constitutional office in the federal government." But the joke is on HBO, and maybe on us. The network has given us a predictably hapless main character at a time when the office of the vice president has been growing in influence and importance. Since the end of the cold war, vice presidents have been asked to perform an increasing number of executive functions, but the growth has been most striking in the areas of foreign policy and national security. By most accounts, the framers paid scant attention to the constitutional positioning of the office of the vice president. Whether they considered the office legislative or executive or a blurred combination of the two, the office's historical development has shown that it is a fully functioning executive branch agency (notwithstanding former Vice President Cheney's claim that the office was not an "entity within the executive branch"). Theodore Roosevelt is often identified as the first vice president to seek a significant expansion of institutional power, while the tenures of Richard Nixon and Walter Mondale are recognized as notable leaps forward for the power of the vice president, a strength often reflected by the growth in the size of the vice president's staff. There have certainly been setbacks. When Cheney was Secretary of Defense, for example, he appears to have viewed the vice president's powers a bit differently. He opposed Dan Quayle's attempt to play an influential foreign policy role during the Bush administration. But despite this type of roadblock the growth of the vice president's influence and responsibility since the end of the cold war has been extraordinary. The most tangible evidence may be the change in proximity to the locus of power. For most of our history, the vice president's office was in the Capitol. Lyndon Johnson moved it to the White House, and Walter Mondale moved it into the West Wing. The subsequent tenures of George Bush (under Ronald Reagan) and Al Gore marked the institutionalization of the vice president's influence and power, as the vice president moved from discreet, sometimes unheard, presidential adviser to prominent policy maker. In our current hyper-partisan environment, it may be worth noting that the expansion of the vice president's power has been a bipartisan phenomenon. By the time Cheney ascended to the office, it was commonly accepted, indeed expected, that the vice president would chair executive branch commissions, serve as the president's representative at foreign and diplomatic venues and as a key administration spokesperson, and play a leading role in the development and implementation of many of the administration's policy initiatives, both foreign and domestic. This gradual increase in the power and influence of the office of the vice president accelerated enormously when Cheney took the post in January 2001. During his tenure, the office was instrumental in the development of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program, military commission policy and novel legal approach to the detention of Qaeda and Taliban fighters - often without input from, and in some cases in contravention of, the executive branch officials explicitly charged with providing national security and counterterrorism advice to the president. Scholars and commentators have suggested that the powers exercised by the office of the vice president during Cheney's tenure were unique to his view of executive power, his relationship with President Bush and special conditions in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and that they would cease with Cheney's departure. Such observations miss the mark. Any future occupant of the office will be able to significantly influence national security policy by drawing on the legal authorities and institutional practices now in place. To name only the most prominent - the vice president has a permanent seat on the National Security Council, access to all classified information and the authority to determine what information should be classified. Some of these powers are statutory and some are the result of executive delegation - neither category is easily retracted. Despite Vice President Biden's pledge to scale back the office, he continues to play a prominent role in national security matters, as illustrated by his placement at the president's right in the iconic photo of the national security team during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. No president has thought more about the role that the vice president should play in foreign policy and national security than Dwight D. Eisenhower. For both constitutional and administrative reasons Eisenhower gave Vice President Nixon an influential role in National Security Council deliberations. But Senator Henry Jackson, as part of a sweeping criticism of Eisenhower's management of national security, warned that there were strict limits to the authority that the president could grant to the vice president: "Of course, the role of the Vice President need not be limited to his constitutional obligation to preside over the Senate. But any attempt to make the Vice President a kind of Deputy President for Foreign Affairs would be to give the wrong man the wrong job. As Romney finalizes his selection of a running mate, Senator Jackson's criticism deserves to be reconsidered, because the scope of the national security and foreign policy challenges facing the United States make it more important than ever that the president be able to rely on the vice president for counsel in these areas. This is particularly true when the president himself lacks the relevant experience, as was the case with George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and would be true of Mitt Romney if he succeeds in his bid. The vice president can and should play an important role in helping the president evaluate and prioritize these challenges. Obama recognizes this and has allowed Biden to play the role of contrarian in national security and foreign policy deliberations. Of course, Romney will evaluate potential running mates on a number of factors - readiness for the top job (14 vice presidents have gone on to become president), compatibility, firming up the base, geographic pull and sizzle (whatever that means). But topping the list of considerations should be an assessment of the vice presidential candidate's vision for the office and of how that candidate would exercise its enormous powers. If Romney fails to do so, he deprives the American people of the opportunity to judge the vice presidential candidate as a principal and powerful policy player, and not just as comic relief. Amy C. Gaudion is assistant dean for academic affairs at Penn State's Dickinson School of Law. Douglas Stuart is a professor of political science and international studies at Dickinson College and an adjunct research professor at the U.S. Army War College.