The Vice President is kind of a strange office. It has almost no real power, famously called by Adams "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." Even just what the VP was supposed to do with the Preosdent died seems to have been unclear and debated when it first happened - was he an interim placeholder, or now the real president?
But it does have one, actual role - breaking ties in the Senate. Thinking on this, something struck me though. The high minded Founding Fathers, writing the Constitution, hoped that parties/factions wouldn't be a thing. Candidates for President would simply be the best and brightest the country had to offer. As such, the winner became President and the Runner-Up became Vice President. This only changed in 1804 with the 12th Amendment. So while now the VP serves to break a tie in the Senate in favor of the administration's position on a bill, assuming a Vice Presidency in less than concert with the Presidency - of which the Adams-Jefferson administration would seem to be the main example of - the VP would actually be quite possibly a tie breaker against the President's wish.
So basically, what was the rational behind the creation and shaping of the office of Vice President as originally conceptualized, and more specifically, was there some intent to have the VP be a counterweight to the President, or is it really just a reflection on the idealism of the Founding Fathers that the Prez and VP would be above party politics?
There was much uncertainty after the ratification of the Constitution over what the role of both the President and Vice President would be. Obviously the President would be given more power than his role as a sort of modest "national manager" under the Articles of Confederation government, but just how much power he would hold remained unclear. The Vice President's power was in many ways contingent on the power afforded to the President.
There were many of the Anti-Federalist persuasion who were highly suspicious of a strong executive (Thomas Jefferson being the most prominent). Despite their tacit admittance that the Articles of Confederation government was ultimately unworkable, adherents of that philosophy were wary of giving the Chief Executive too much power so as to render to him a kingly and tyrannical status. Conversely, the Federalists (epitomized by Hamilton, their greatest luminary) envisioned the President as being a strong Head of State with sweeping unilateral powers in order to check the rivalry between states and the pursuance of local interests over national welfare. There was thus a high level of division among the framers of the Constitution and the participants in the new government over how exactly the Executive's role should and would unfold- the Vice Presidency was very much dependent on that.
It's important to note that the Vice President's role, as prescribed in the Constitution, is that of President of the Senate. The tangible power he is given, as has been noted already, is to cast the tie-breaking vote in the event of an impasse, which on the surface seems paltry. But it's crucial to understand how the Senate was thought of during the years following the ratification of the Constitution. Anglophile Federalists like Hamilton conceived of the Senate as being akin to the House of Lords in Britain and the House of Representatives as corresponding to the House of Commons, the obvious implication being that the Senate was the more substantive and important legislative body (hence their exclusive right to approve treaties). The Vice President would therefore preside over what, to Anglophile Federalists like Hamilton, the equivalent of Parliament giving him a sort of Prime Ministerial status. It was not known yet what the President's relationship would be to the Congress (as far as things like regular addresses, formality of communication, frequency of bill introduction, etc. were concerned) so some believed the Vice President would be the more active member of the Executive administration in actual government business. Many liberal democracies around the world follow a "Head of State" and "Head of Government" as being separate offices and the intention of some Federalists can be characterized as resembling that arrangement.
Washington, however, set the precedent of being an active and engaged executive and it soon became clear that the President wouldn't just become an elected King (as some people actually advocated). Moreover, the rising tide of Jeffersonian populist democracy and the accession to government offices of more "middling" types of men of a less aristocratic status than the early Senators called for a complete rejection, rather than a mere modification, of the British System. The duty that some hoped the Vice President would perform thus became antiquated by the nation's move toward a more popular form of democracy and Washington's precedent of a strong and active Presidency.
Source:
Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early American Republic, 1789-1815 Oxford University Press, 2009
Washington didn't include Adams often in meetings. Anyone know why a man of his statue was excluded?