Ineligible means ineligible, i.e., legally disqualified to hold an office. How can someone fulfill a job he/she can’t have?
Yep. It skips right over that person and goes down the line.
I think there’s a couple of cabinet secretaries right now that this is true for.
Ah, yes. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez and Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao are both non-natural citizens and therefore the succession jumps from Ed Schafer (Agriculture) to Michael Levitt (HHS).
Former Secretary of State Medeline Albright was also a naturalized citizen (born in Prague) so succession would have skipped over her.
I have two questions:
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What if the candidate selects someone from a different party? For example Obama chooses Huckabee?
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At what point does eligibility kick in or out? Also for example, say at some point during the election or during the Obama presidency Hawaii revolts and declairs it’s independance. Would Obama still be eligible due to Hawaii’s statehood when he was born? If Cuba had been a state from 1930 - 1940 then there was a massive communist takeover. Would a candidate were born there in 1939 and immigrated to the US in the 60’s or 70’s still be eligible
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What about it? If the party approves the selection and the people elect the team, no problem. More than likely, if Obama suddenly went insane and selected Huckabee as his running mate, the delegates would refuse to vote for him at the convention, forcing Barack to select someone they could tolerate.
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AFAIK, eligibility is permanent with regards to birth. If you were born in a state, and the state later ceased to exist as part of the Union, you would still be eligible. Kinda moot, as the US doesn’t recognize the right of a state to secede. Once a stae, always a state.
There’s a technically-invalid but effectively true proof of Silenus’s point #2 in history: Andrew Johnson.
Johnson was Senator from Tennessee during Secession Winter, and declared himself loyal to the Union. He continued to represent the State of Tennessee in the U.S. Senate although the state itself seceded. (But remember that U.S. constitutional law says that a unilateral act of secession is invalid.) He was chosen as Lincoln’s running mate on a Union ticket – Illinois Republican for President, Southern Democrat for Vice – since there were only a handful of Southern Democrat political leaders who had remained loyal, and of course succeeded to the Presidency when Lincoln was assassinated. When selected as V.P., though, he was from a state that was de facto not part of the Union.
The U.S. could lose territory in other ways than through state secession. For example, if Puerto Rico became independent, presumably people born in PR before independence would retain US citizenship.
What of a state that was not a state, province or territory before hand? eg. US annexes and unites Hispanola making it a US territory and it’s people US citizens. Is someone who was born 50 years before this eligible or would the date of eligibility start at the date of incorporation?
I would think this would have come up before many times as the nation formed and started adding states.
Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona when it was still a territory of the US and not yet a state. There was a little discussion in '64 about whether this made him illegible to be President. But I do not believe it was ever seriously considered that he wasn’t. I assume, in any case, that both of his parents were citizens making him a natural-born citizen.
OTOH, I suspect it might well be different if the place of birth didn’t have any affiliation with the US at the time of birth in question.
There is also another requirement. The person must be 14 years a resident of the US, so you presumably couldn’t be President within 14 years of the annexation
From what I understand, Sen. Goldwater had excellent penmanship.
A more realistic chance of getting a president and vice president from different parties would happen if there were three strong candidates. Let’s say no one candidate got a majority in the electoral college. The the House selects the president and the Senate selects the vice president. So if you could have the House controlled by Republicans and the Senate controlled by Democrats and then if each party voted strictly on party lines this would happen.
When Nixon hadn’t yet appointed Ford and it looked like he might resign the Speaker of The House, who was a Democrat questioned whether it was proper for him to take over when the nation selected a Republican. Can you see anyone doing that today? LOL
Only if the Speaker of the House was played by John Goodman.
Remember that when the House selects a president, it votes by state, not by member. So the key is who controls the most state delegations and that is the Republicans.
In this case, a state with one representative in the House (like Wyoming) counts the same as California.
That’s why Cheney claimed he was still a resident of Wyoming, not Texas.
If the OP’s friend also meant in part that the President can dump the VP and get a new one if he wants, that isn’t true either. The VP cannot be removed involuntarily by any means other than impeachment. Even before the election, only the party, not the Presidential nominee, can change its VP nominee. Thomas Eagleton was a f’rinstance.
Maybe so, but to be honest I think that not being allowed to have any of their citizens become president for at least 14 or 35 years would lower the incentive for a country to join the US as a state. I wonder if there would be a way for Congress to, for example, declare natural born citizenship in this state or citizenship at the time of annexation equivalent to American natural born citizenship, and declare that the 14 years of residence may include residence in this state before it became an American state. Is there a precedent for this?
The 14-year requirement would have kept *anyone * from being President in the early years, interpreted that way. The previous clause about citizenship was interpreted to mean “citizen of an entity that became part of the United States when the Constitution was adopted”. That had to have covered the 14-year residency clause too - it’s part of the same sentence.