So....today was the funeral of Darth Cheney.   (I know, don't speak ill of the dead, so I'll not mention him again).  Here's a photo of it: 

You can see two former presidents here: George W. Bush and his wife and Joe Biden and his wife. 

Also, in this pic is every living former Vice-President: Dan Quayle, Al Gore, Joe Biden (also a former VP), Mike Pence and Kamala Harris.  (Im pretty sure in other pics I saw Quayle's and Pence's wives there too).  No Clinton or Obama, though both of them made classy, sympathetic posts to social media and presumably, have been in contact with the family. 

Of course the family did NOT invite the orange shitgibbon or Vice President Couchfucker.  And really, who can blame them? 

But that makes me wonder: what's the protocol here?  Is it by family invite only?  Is it just assumed all the living VP's will go to a VP's funeral?    What about former presidents, can they just show up to a VP's funeral?  In this case the only former presidents were the president the dead VP served under and a former President who is also a former VP, so that may have gotten him in?  

I don't know if there IS any protocol.   The last VP to die was Walter Mondale, but he died in 2022, as COVID was still around, so only the current president and VP, Biden and Harris showed up.  Jimmy Carter, the president he served under was too ill then to travel. 

The one before him was George HW Bush in 2018, but he was also a former president, so that may overshadow any protocol for VPs.

The one before that was Gerald Ford, who died in 2006, but again, he too was a former President, which may overshadow the VP protocols. 

The one before HIM was Spiro Agnew, Nixon's first VP, who died in 1996.  Now he resigned under a scandal, so that may have limited who showed up, but I'm gonna check the Google and see.  Well, apparently, no presidents or VP attended his for the that reason: the scandal.  Next!

The one before Agnew was Richard Nixon in 1994, but he TOO was also a president.  NEXT!

The one before Nixon was Nelson Rockefeller, Ford's VP, in 1979.   The funeral was private on their estate, but there was a later memorial service that President Carter attended, but I don't see anything about any other Presidents or VP. 

One more (cause we're like 50 years in the past now), the one before him was Hubert Humphrey, LBJ's VP who died in 1978.   Here I found that then current president Jimmy Carter, former presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and then current Vice President Walter Mondale.  At that point the only living only VP was Agnew, and he probably didn't show because of the scandal. 

So I don't know what, if anything, all this tells us.   But as lifelong avid student of useless presidential trivia, it was fun to look up and go into. 

POLT