The only responsibility and power of the Vice President under the Constitution is to faithfully count the electoral college votes as they have been cast. The Constitution does not empower the Vice President to alter in any way the votes that have been cast, either by rejecting certain of them or otherwise. How the Vice President discharges this constitutional obligation is not a question of his loyalty to the President any more than it would be a test of a President’s loyalty to his Vice President whether the President assented to the impeachment and prosecution of his Vice President for the commission of high crimes while in office. No President and no Vice President would—or should—consider either event as a test of political loyalty of one to the other. And if either did, he would have to accept that political loyalty must yield to constitutional obligation. Neither the President nor the Vice President has any higher loyalty than to the Constitution.

It seemed to me I could do something in that vein with my characters: the ticking clock, dire jeopardy, quick changes of fortune, small acts having huge consequences.

Merely by representing salary and/or job description in annual terms, you may be legally stuck with a mishire for that one-year period.

As for the pulling of them [ambitious men] downe, if the Affaires require it, and that it may not be done with ſafety ſuddainly, the onely Way is, the Enterchange, continually of Fauours, and Diſgraces, whereby they may not know, what to expect; And be, as it were, in a Wood.