For decades, the president's number two was largely ignored and limited to boring ceremonial duties: Before his death, Franklin Roosevelt didn't even tell Harry S Truman about the atom bomb. The indignity heaped on number twos has been encapsulated by Robert Caro in his most recent biographical volume on Lyndon Johnson who was treated like dirt by the Kennedy brothers and in the HBO comedy "Veep," when the hilariously self-serving Selina Meyer repeatedly and pathetically asks: "Has the President called?"

Some veeps did eventually find places among history's most significant presidents, like the 20th-century trio of Truman, Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt, who all succeeded dead superiors. The job has also improved in recent years: Though current Vice President Mike Pence appears to view his role as showering praise on his boss every time a camera is near, the three vice presidents before him were unusually influential: Al Gore, Dick Cheney and Biden himself had genuine authority and significant assignments.

And it's hard to see a President Biden running for a second term that would begin when he is 82. So his vice president could automatically become the Democratic front-runner in 2024, and might even be able to avoid a prolonged primary campaign altogether.

2019 vs. 2020

From Trump with love

Sometimes it's hard to spot the difference between the President of the United States and a Kremlin spokesman. Donald Trump's deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin has yet to be adequately explained, but it's undeniable that he often seems to be reading a list of Moscow's talking points -- especially when he's recently spoken with the ex-KGB man.

Trump often also seems to advance Russia's national security interests as much as America's, and did so as recently as Wednesday by ordering thousands of US troops out of Germany, carving another divide in NATO. He's also still trying to get Russia back into the G7, after it was kicked out for annexing Crimea.

'I might have put ... some of the virus onto the mask'

Congressional hearing stunts

The US Congress has a vital constitutional role to hold the president and his administration to account. Over the years, moments of stellar parliamentary inquiry have changed politics and the world: The wartime Senate Committee on the National Defense Program chaired by then-Senator Harry S Truman, for example, investigated profiteering. In the 1970s, a Senate Select Committee's bipartisan probe unearthed key aspects of the Watergate scandal that eventually brought President Richard Nixon down.

Ohio's Representative Jim Jordan spouted a string of hard-to-follow conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation, then played spliced-together videos of violence in US cities meant to demonstrate an epidemic of leftist violence. He got into a spat with another combustible member, Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, after he took off his mask -- and then turned on a dime to raise false claims about an Obama administration plot to target Trump aides for surveillance.

Barr, performing for the President, and Democrats, with their own political incentives, staged vocal clashes. Colorado Democrat Joe Neguse tripped up Barr by asking if he stands by a claim that the White House fully cooperated with the Russia investigation. "I have to answer that question. ... I'm going to answer the damn question!" Barr said, as Neguse tried to cut him off.

In another case of a friend of Trump's doing the President's work, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz accused Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Wednesday of being in league with the Chinese military, during a hearing of tech titans that included Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

You sometimes have to pity the witness. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat through 11 hours of Republican tomfoolery during a 2015 hearing that was transparently intended to damage her presidential campaign. But her eye rolls and temple rubs spawned viral memes.

Sometimes the entertainment in congressional hearings is inadvertent, and exposes the body's most venerable members to ridicule as they catch up on the topic at hand. The late Senator Ted Stevens secured immortality when the Alaska Republican described the internet not as a truck to dump things on but as "a series of tubes." And in 2018, Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah appeared to amuse Zuckerberg by asking how Facebook made its billions.

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The curse of the vice presidency and legendary congressional hearing stunts - CNN