Historically, one of the chief jobs of the Vice President is to cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate, as necessary. No VP was put to the test more than the nation’s very first VP, John Adams. Senators reportedly thought of Adams as a bit of a windbag who “harangued” his captive audience for 40 minutes at a time. Over the course of his terms, Adams cast 29 tie-breaking votes. Some of these votes included preventing the capital from staying in New York two years more, preventing a war with Britain, and giving the President full authority to fire his Cabinet appointees without Senae approval.
How many times did each vice president cast a tie-breaking vote?
- John Adams – 29
- Thomas Jefferson – 3
- Aaron Burr – 3
- George Clinton — 11
- Elbridge Gerry — 8
- Daniel Tompkins — 5
- John Calhoun — 28
- Martin Van Buren — 4
- Richard Johnson — 14
- John Tyler — 0
- George Dallas — 19
- Millard Fillmore — 5
- William King — 0
- John Breckinridge — 10
- Hannibal Hamlin — 7
- Andrew Johnson – 0
- Schuyler Colfax – 13
- Henry Wilson — 1
- William Wheeler — 5
- Chester Arthur — 3
- Thomas Hendricks — 0
- Levi Morton — 4
- Adlai Stevenson — 2
- Garret Hobart — 1
- Theodore Roosevelt — 0
- Charles Fairbanks — 0
- James Sherman — 4
- Thomas Marshall — 10
- Calvin Coolidge — 0
- Charles Dawes — 2
- Charles Cutis — 3
- John Nance Garner — 3
- Henry Wallace — 4
- Harry Truman — 1
- Alben Barkley — 7
- Richard Nixon — 8
- Lyndon Johnson — 0
- Hubert Humphrey — 4
- Spiro Agnew — 2
- Gerald Ford — 0
- Nelson Rockefeller — 0
- Walter Mondale — 1
- George Bush — 7
- Dan Quayle — 0
- Al Gore — 4
- Dick Cheney – 8
- Joe Biden — 0
