News that leading Republicans are unwilling to be a running mate for Donald Trump — reported over the weekend in the New York Times — raises the question of whether this might be the moment for a radical vice president. That would be one determined to restore to the vice presidency its constitutional role as a member not of the executive branch but of the Senate. And also as an independent actor.

We comprehend that this is crosswise contra the current constitutional context. The standard references try to palm off on their readers the idea that vice president is, as Wikipedia puts it, the “the second-highest position in the executive branch of the United States, after the president.” Such a reference would be banned outright by the “Reporter’s Handbook and Manual of Style of The New York Sun.”

That tome states: “It is not permitted, save for direct quotation, to refer in the Sun to the Vice President of the United States as a member of the executive branch.” That’s because the Constitution creates the vice president — that is, first mentions the office — in the course of creating the Congress and assigns the vice president his main constitutional duty, serving as president of the Senate.

Not that the Sun is the first to notice this point. Scores of scholars and journalists have studied it. Vice President Cheney even tried to establish the point in court in the course of seeking shelter of against an order to provide evidence; the shelter he first sought was available to members of the legislature. We’d have permitted it. Amid the uproar he turned around and sought shelter under privileges enjoyed by the executive. Humbug.

In any event, what has yet to be explored in modern times are the full possibilities of the vice president as an independent player in his own right. Presidents tend to treat “their” vice presidents as staff or members of the administration. This goes back to the awkwardness of John Adams, who famously mumbled: “I feel a great difficulty as to how to act. I am vice president, yes. And in this I am nothing.”

We’d have stopped him right there and encouraged him not to get to so down on the constitutional office to which he’d just been elected. “But,” Adams went on to mutter, “I may be everything”; he was meantime too besotted with President Washington, however magnificent the general was. Better for Adams to have bucked up and used his powers in the Senate as an independent player.

Whether or not owing or to Adams’ unease, the powers of the vice presidency slipped away over the decades, and today the “modern” vice president — the first one to be libeled as modern was Vice President Nixon — functions more as an aide to the president. The position of the Sun is that this is unconstitutional, in that no member of Congress may hold any other office.

It strikes us, just to mark the point, as a constitutional affront for the vice president to be sitting in cabinet meetings. His place at any hour is in the Senate, where he has a splendid office. The point for the current crisis is that the vice president is part of the system of checks and balances, including on the president at the head of the ticket on which the vice president was elected (if they were elected on the same ticket).

The notion that the vice president merely presides over the Senate — and then only on rare occasions — and eschews any role in the policy debates is to our plain reading nowhere to be found in the plain language of the Constitution. It’s a tradition generated by the Senate itself. Whether it could be put paid to in a single term, this is hard to say. But what’s the logic of shrinking from the office.

It strikes us that it would be folly for anyone to turn down an invitation to run for vice president on the Republican line (or, for that matter, the Democratic line)— and equal folly to fail to stand apart from any president who runs off the constitutional or policy rails. No president can fire a vice president, or even tell him what to do. Something for all the candidates for vice president to remember.