Sure, why not? The only limitations are outlined in the Constitution:
must be 35 years old.
natural born citizen.
resident of U.S. for last 14 years
and under Amdt. 22:
may not be “elected” President if already been elected twice.
Our history has recognized that there are two methods of becoming President: 1) election to the office, and 2) succession to the office. Unless we want to say that John Tyler, Chester Arthur, Gerald Ford, etc. were not actually the President (and the 22nd amendment directly specifies that Ford WAS the President) then we recognize method #2 of “becoming” President.
Since there are two ways to become President, and the 22nd amendment only discusses one of those methods, we must logically conclude that the other method is available under the 22nd amendment and presents no bar.
Let’s say that in 2020, Obama became Speaker of the House and the POTUS and VPOTUS were killed in a terrorist attack. What language in the Constitution would you use to say that Obama was not now “acting President”? None right? Isn’t that a concession that he is eligible to the office?
Therefore, since he is eligible to the office of President, the 12th amendment says that he is eligible (or better stated, not ineligible) to the office of the Vice President.
Albright is ineligible to be elected or succeed to the office because she is not a natural born citizen. Two-time presidents are only ineligible to be elected president per the plain and unambiguous (IMHO) language of the 22nd amendment. The situation is different.
Anyone who served more than 2 years as unelected President (e.g., the VP), can only be elected once. There is a bit of gray area that perhaps Obama could serve as President should the elected President resign or die, but then he would be ineligible to run for President at the end of the term. Nobody’s quite sure of the answer to this. It hasn’t come up, because nobody wants the Vice Presidency after the Presidency. Pretty much everyone has found something else to do.
But just so I’m following you: you do believe Obama could serve as Secretary of State in someone else’s administration, right?
And if the President and VP and et cetera then died, such that he were next in the line of succession, you believe that – what, exactly, would happen at that point?
I don’t know about that… The amendment makes very specific mention of being elected President rather than saying no one shall ‘gain’ or ‘take’ or some other phrasing to make it universal and prohibit succession to the office. It seems odd, since it would seem like the intent is to prevent anyone from serving more than two terms as President, but why specify elected?
I imagine it was simply an oversight, since the clear intent of the amendment was to prevent any individual serving as President more than 2 and a half terms. Most likely, the bizarre and contorted scenarios that have since been imagined didn’t occur to anyone at the time.
I’m rather certain that if you examined the discussions of the amendment at the time, this point will generally have been ignored. It’s really unimaginable that the writers of the amendment used “elected” to allow a loophole for someone to serve more than two terms through shenanigans. Does anyone really think that?
There are plenty of other examples of ambiguously framed laws, the Second Amendment being a prime example.
They seem to like continuity, though, so if Michelle Obama wanted to be Biden’s Veep…
This was assumed, I recall, during Madeleine Albright’s term as SecState. She was not eligible for the presidency as she’d not been born a U.S. citizen, and was considered out of the line of succession.
Why? Secretary of State Obama wouldn’t be getting elected President.
We all agree that Secretary of State Albright would’ve gotten skipped over, because she’s not allowed to be President. But a hypothetical Secretary of State Obama, he’s only banned from getting elected President – and in the scenario under discussion, nobody’s electing him to anything: not Governor, nor Senator, not President.
FWIW, something semi-comparable happened in Russia – Putin was president from 2000 to 2008, then spent one term as prime minister “under” Medvedev, and in 2012 he went back to being president.
I agree that the question is unanswerable, and honestly, I think most pretty much all the living (former) presidents would explicitly refuse the office for fear of being seen a tyrant if it came up. I think the American people would expect it to not go to them, and thus regardless of how the law can be read, we’re in a sort of law-by-folk-belief situation with this case. The President is such a public-facing position, that to some degree folk belief matters when it comes to completely untested scenarios like this.
I think that if a former president really wanted to make a power grab, they potentially could weasel their way in by becoming Speaker or something and hoping for an accident. They can try and ride in on a technicality due to the way the amendment is worded. However, they’d be faced with such a suspicious, uncooperative populace and congress they’d be a lame duck from the start of their term. (Not to mention people would be fishing for reasons to impeach them)
I’d say that, for all practical purposes, a former two-term President cannot become Vice President, or inherit the presidency via any other means of succession.
The interpretation that the law only says “elected” strikes me as a “ain’t no rule says a dog can’t play hockey” sort of argument. Well, true, but it probably isn’t going to happen due to the inherent weirdness of it.
Strikes me more as an “ain’t no rule says a septuagenarian can’t be President” sort of argument: we have a clearly-worded ban on guys under thirty-five, and no ban on guys over sixty-five – and while I don’t know why we banned the former without banning the latter, I know that we banned the former without banning the latter.
A number of guys are banned from ever getting elected President again, and I don’t know why we banned 'em from that but didn’t ban 'em from anything else. But as far as I can tell, we banned 'em from that, and we didn’t ban 'em from anything else.
Because the intent of the amendment is clearly to prevent Presidents from serving more than two and a half terms. It was a direct result of FDR’s being elected to four terms. Republicans in particular at the time wanted to prevent that kind consolidation of power. (Ironically, Eisenhower could probably have been elected to a third term if he had wanted it.)
Are you seriously contending that the intent of including the term “elected” was to provide a route for a President to serve more than two terms by a means other than being elected to an additional one? If so, I would ask you to link to any document whatsoever at the time the amendment was being proposed and ratified that supports that conclusion.
The argument, at its core, is silly and pointless. The distinction between “eligible to be elected” and “eligible to serve” wasn’t made at the time, and would be politically impossible to exploit under any reasonable scenario today.
The fact that the intent may have been otherwise does not make plain words ambiguous. And how do we know that the intent was otherwise? Perhaps the drafters would have no problem a former President serving as VP for a couple of years?
I would suggest that the burden is on you to support the contention that Congress didn’t mean what it clearly said. And even if you could (which is not unlikely) that doesn’t mean that they actually wrote what they intended. If it is a drafting error, then the error is for Congress to correct.
Again, plain text is the first tool of statutory construction. The words “elected President” have a definite meaning that is not in dispute. When we have ambiguous or undefined terms like “due process of law” or “equal protection” or “shall not be infringed” then we then, and only then, look to the intent of the drafters.
I agree that the scenario is unlikely and the public would probably not support a token candidacy, for example, in 2016, the Democrats nominate Jimmy Carter for President, and Obama for VP with the explicit understand that once elected, Carter will resign, allow Obama to become President, with a pledge to appoint Biden as VP. The public would rightfully see that as a dirty trick. However, the 22nd amendment does not prohibit it, and using existing precedent, I don’t see how a court would rule otherwise.
Because, as has been said, the main purpose of having a Vice President is to serve as a replacement President in the case of death or disability. We know that the intent was otherwise because having such a provision would be incredibly stupid. (Not that Congress doesn’t make stupid laws, but they are usually not deliberately phrased to defeat their own purpose.)
Congress and the nation clearly said that they didn’t want anyone serving more than two and a half terms in passing the Amendment. The burden is on you to provide evidence that this was not intended.
It hasn’t been corrected because no one seriously believes it’s a problem.
As I said, the Supreme Court did not take this approach with the recent decision on the Affordable Care Act. They went against the actual phrasing of the bill and looked at intent.
I can’t imagine that they would endorse it, using existing precedent (cited above).
There is nothing to prevent Congress from annexing Arnold Schwarznegger’s home town in Austria and then declaring that he was a natural born citizen and eligible for the Presidency. (They declared John McCain a natural born citizen, even though he was not a US citizen at birth. He became one due to a correction to a loophole in the existing law concerning births to US citizens outside the US about a year after his birth). That doesn’t mean that there’s the remotest chance of this actually happening.
Wait…how old is our Skald T. Rhymer? Because I could totally see: elected to two terms, run as VP under one of his excellently-groomed minions, who mysteriously snuffs at the inaugural ball. President Rhymer assumes a third term. And then runs as VP under another excellently-groomed minion who also snuffs it early on…
On point: if the Ex pres VP doesn’t have the doesn’t have the decency to decline a return to power, the SCOUTS would almost certainly disallow it to head off a dangerous and shenanigans-inspiring precedent. That is within their powers, isn’t it?
I would guess that if a suit were brought (which it would be), the Supremes would decide that a former two term President was ineligible to run for VP in the first place. But this issue will never be decided in the foreseeable future, since politically it would never get that far.