New York Magazine is out with a well-articulated piece called “The Biden Trap.” It’s about the predicament of progressive women who want a member of their sex for vice president but are uncomfortable with the leading man for the top of the ticket. Joseph Biden has now been accused of such a serious act of sexual assault that the vice presidential candidacy has become “the stuff of feminist nightmares.”

That is the phrase of New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister. She reprises the charges leveled against Mr. Biden by a woman, Tara Reade, who worked in Mr. Biden’s office in the early 1990s. Mr. Biden denies the allegations. Ms. Traister reckons that “part of what’s sickeningly clear is that if Biden remains the Democratic nominee, whichever woman gets the nod to be his running mate will wind up drinking from a poisoned chalice.”

It’s not our intention in this editorial to sort out the issue of sexual harassment. We comprehend that it’s an issue. In actual cases, left and right, the Sun favors objective reporting and straightforward enforcement of the law with due regard for due process. It happens, though, that from the predicament progressive women feel in the current circumstances, we spy an escape hatch. And it interests us.

It has to do with the nature of the vice presidency itself. The more we hoe the constitutional row, the more it strikes us that the vice presidency has been mis-used in the modern era. This isn’t a partisan thing. The vice president, next in line for the presidency, has become a kind of deputy to the president, to be assigned various tasks, hither or yon, as the president may wish to delegate to him (or her).

Where is that written — or even authorized? One minute a vice president can be sent to a foreign funeral. Another he can be running oversight of efforts to combat the coronavirus. The president tells him what to do, when to do it, where to stand, and what, or what not, to say. Where does the president, any president, get that authority? We can’t find it anywhere in the 8,000 or so words of the national parchment.

The vice president, of course, wasn’t originally chosen the way he is now. Originally, the idea was that the vice presidency would go to the runner up for the president in the electoral college. In 1796, the electoral college gave the presidency to John Adams and the vice presidency to his political foe, Thos. Jefferson, who spent the next four years undercutting Adams. The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, ended that system.

Now electors vote separately for president and vice president. The president secures the vice president’s loyalty by favoring a candidate at his party’s nominating convention. Come the election, though, the vice president is elected in his own right. A president can’t fire a vice president, lower his pay, or tell him what to do. Constitutionally, the vice president’s only duty is to preside over the Senate.

It’s only relatively recently that a vice president took an office in the executive branch at all. The first to participate in the executive branch duties was was President Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon. Vice President Lyndon Johnson took an office in the White House complex. Until then, the vice president had his office at the Capitol, in the vice president’s room. It’s far from the most magnificent room in the legislative pile (the Speaker of the House has a more glorious office). It is, though, independent of the White House.

Which brings us back to the poisoned chalice. Ms. Traister reckons that it’s “near impossible to imagine prominent Democratic women” being able to “give voice” to the concerns about the allegations about Mr. Biden and “still wind up with any sway” in a Biden administration.” A woman (or any) vice president, though, could base herself not in the White House but on Capitol Hill, establish her distance, preside daily over the Senate, and preserve the dignity of the vice presidency itself.

________

Correction: Reade is the spelling of the surname of Mr. Biden’s accuser.