[ul]
[li]Can a incarserated felon get on the ballot in enough states to theoretically stand a chance of winning the presidency?[/li][li]If he does win, can he give himself a presidential pardon and get free, or does he have to rule from his prison cell?[/li][/ul]
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Sure. See Lyndon Larouche.
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I don’t know.
Americans do not vote for president. They vote for a slate of electors who are committed to a certain presidential candidate. The interesting question is, what happens if one or more of the electors is in prison, and therefore restricted from traveling to Washington to take part in the Electoral College? As far as I know, there is no legal criteria for electors, not even that they be US citizens. Frequently Asked Questions | National Archives
Doesn’t the President-elect have to take the Oath of Office before he officially “gets his powers” so to speak? So one question could be whether or not the President-elect has free reign to choose the location of the oath (e.g. if the prez-elect is incarcerated, could he demand that he be administered the oath in his cell or in the prison excercise yard?)
Also, I was under the impression that the President’s pardon powers were limited to Federal offenses (and possibly Territorial offenses e.g. crimes in DC or Puerto Rico) and that State offenses had to be pardoned via State law, usually by the Governor, because the States are sovereign regarding their own criminal law.
See Eugene V. Debs. He was convicted of sedition and disenfranchised for life, but ran for president in the 1920 election from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and received 913,664 votes. Harding commuted his sentence to time served in 1921.
You’re right.
It’s unclear whether the electee automatically becomes President or must take the oath first. Zachery Taylor refused to be sworn in on March 4, 1849, because that was a Sunday, but modern historians don’t believe that the country was without a President for that day. (And David Rice Atchison was certainly never Acting President.) Most accounts of the transition after Kennedy’s assassination consider Johnson the President the moment Kennedy died. He took an oath as quickly as possible because of the symbolic nature, but whether that had statutory power (if that’s the right legal term) is harder to determine. Similarly, when Roberts messed up the wording of the oath at Obama’s inauguration and they redid it later on, nobody has made any legal ruling whether the repeat was necessary. It’s also possible that without the oath the electee is President but has no powers, for whatever that might mean.
Without the oath, I believe there could be an argument that the president couldnt veto bills, appoint judges, grant pardons, etc.
The oath is **required **by the Constitution (Article Two, Section One, Clause Eight):
But there’s nothing that says you have to take the oath from the Chief Justice on the Capitol steps. LBJ took it on a plane from a district judge. Coolidge took it at home, with his father administering it. No reason a prisoner couldn’t take his oath of office in his cell.
Exactly. There is an argument. There is no case law whatsoever. So you can presume anything you want, but can’t back it up.
The Electoral college never meets as a single body. Each states electors meet in that states capital and then mail the ballots to DC. And most states have proceedures to cover absent electors (usually by having the present electors elect new members to fill vacancies).
Did I ever say that it had to be the Chief Justice? You don’t think I know that there have been Presidents sworn in by people other than Chief Justices?
Didn’t mean to imply that it did. That part of my answer was actually in response to robert columbia’s query about whether the president-elect " has free reign to choose the location of the oath."
And remember that at President Obama’s swearing in, John Roberts flubbed the oath. Mr. Obama re-took the oath properly in the oval office the following day “Just in case.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28780417/ns/politics-white_house/t/obama-retakes-oath-office-after-flub/
States mostly set their own qualifications for their electors. The Constitutional qualifications are listed in Article II and the 14th Amendment:
Most states have no additional qualifications beyond the ones specified in the Federal Constitution. Some require that electors be people who have pledged to support the appropriate candidate; for example, Florida:
Well, it would make the idea that the prisoner couldn’t be sworn in seem silly, unless he’s in solitary confinement.
Nobody said anything remotely like this statement. And the idea that being in solitary confinement means that he or she couldn’t take an oath because nobody could visit is somehow even sillier.
A lot packed into one small sentence.
Well, Coolidge’s father was only a notary public, so he re-took it the next day:
Is it clear that anyone has to administer the oath? Could the president just say it in front of a bunch of people on his own initiative?
Nothing about it is clear. Nothing about it has ever reached a court. Everything is assumption or presumption. You can dream up variants and hypotheticals all night but the answer to every one is nobody knows for sure.