Without violating the constitution, specifically the 22nd Amendment.
I heard this years ago so I might have the details wrong. The idea is completely impractical and would never actually work in reality, I’m just asking about the legal feasibility of it.
Anyway, the gist is that you can abuse the 2 ‘free’ years you’d get as POTUS if you were Vice President and the POTUS resigns halfway through their term. Then you run as VP for the next term, the POTUS resigns halfway through, serve another 2 years. Repeat until dead.
Obviously if you were popular enough to pull this off and not piss everyone in America off you might as well just pass another Amendment to nullify the 22nd. But, as it stands, is this (in theory) a way for one man as POTUS and another as VP to simply alternate 2 year long presidencies until they get bored?
There’s the usual thing about you have to be eligible to be elected President in order to be elected Vice-President: “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States”.
And the Constitution also says: “no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once”.
You’re interpreting this to be more than two years in a row. But it doesn’t say that. It could just as easily be interpreted to be more than two years in total.
So your theoretical candidate would be able to run for Vice President and then become President for 729 days. Then he gets elected Vice President again and once again becomes President for another 729 days of this second term. He has now held the office of President for 1458 days, which is more than two years. So at this point, he is not eligible to run for President more than once. And that means he’s also not eligible to run for Vice President more than once. If he gets elected President, he can only have one term. Add in the two half-terms he already had, and he gets essentially the same amount of time in office he’d have had by making two straightforward runs (he actually got two days less).
This is of course the problem with weird theoreticals. Nobody can say anything definitive about them.
Just for argument though, I’m pretty sure you could make a case that the legislative intent of the amendment was just as the OP claims. Nobody seriously considered that anybody would be VP more than once and become President more than once. So this would fly until a new amendment clarified it.
And theory also gives a scenario for a longer stay in office. The theoretical perpetual two-year President would still be eligible to be elected once to a four-year term of his or her own, adding an additional two years to the total.
True. The situation has never arisen and so there’s no official ruling. But I think my interpretation would be a reasonable one. And it would concur with what most people would see as the intent of the text. The intent was clearly supposed to be “You can be President for two full terms plus half of a partial term” not “You can be President for two full terms or an infinite series of half terms”.
So I’d be willing to bet money that’s how it would be ruled if anyone ever tried this.
Yeah, but if you’re the Speaker of the House when the President and VP step down or die in office or whatever, you’d become the President no matter how many years you’d previously Presidented, right? You’re not constitutionally ineligible to be President, even if as per the Amendment you’re ineligible to be elected President.
Probably no. If you are ineligible to be president for any reason, you would just be skipped and the office would go to the next eligible body. This has come up a lot in discussions of Cabinet members, who are not on the long succession list for being an immigrant, like Henry Kissinger. I don’t know offhand if any Speaker has ever been ineligible for this reason, but its certainly possible. If a former two term President got elected to Congress and made Speaker, he or she wouldn’t be eligible either.
If I’m underage or not a natural-born citizen, I’m ineligible to be President. If I’ve been President for too many years, I’m ineligible to be elected President. I see a difference.
Given the propensity of law-making bodies to interpret the language however the hell suits their agenda at the moment, I would not doubt that this is how it would be.
But—the clear language of the article in the Constitution reads as if it were referring to a single term of one individual who was elected president:
“…a term [singular] to which some other person [singular] was elected President…”
It is almost certain that nobody envisioned the hypothetical in the OP, so, of course, there is no objective way to resolve the question.
It would really be up to the Supreme Court to decide. A “President” repeatedly reelected under such a scheme could potentially stack the court in a manner to approve these shenanigans, but then he also risks impeachment by Congress for not upholding his sworn duty to defend the Constitution. It would be a mess at a minimum, a military coup d’etat more likely.
In reality, if a presidential election result is clear, the Supremes would not dare nullify it.
And if the election is extremely close, the Supremes will give the election to whomever they best like.
This doesn’t mean the constitution is unimportant. Enough voters take it literally that a naturalized citizen, or someone who has already served two full terms, would have no chance of Presidential election.
Not to hijack (too much) but there are other ambiguities as well–for example, presidential succession (though this is by statute and, some say, unconstitutional). The P and VP must have been born a US citizen, but the Speaker of the House and cabinet members need not have been–yet the speaker is third in line of succession in case of disaster, and the cabinet behind the speaker. What happens if, say, the speaker and most of the cabinet were foreign-born and next eligible in line after a disaster would be, like, the Secretary of HHS? CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS on top of whatever killed the P and VP!
And what if succession went all the way down to Canadian-born Ted Cruz? =o
There’s already a bajillion threads on this, but your two cites from the Constitution highlight the debate. The 20th amendment states that a term-limited President (“TLP”) is only ineligible to be “elected” to the office again. It does not say that he cannot become President by other means such as being the VP when the President resigns.
Therefore, under the interpretation, the TLP is not “ineligible to the office of President” under the 12th amendment, only ineligible to be “elected” to said office. Since he is not “ineligible” to BE the President, he may be the VP and then become President in the normal manner of succession.
And the reality of it would be that someone with enough electoral clout to pull this off would almost certainly have enough support to get a Constitutional amendment passed nullifying term limits.
As I noted, there is no official ruling on this issue because the issue has never been raised before the court. So it’s all speculation.
That said, we can speculate on some issues with pretty good confidence. If, for example, somebody tried to argue that he could be President for 5496 days because the Constitution doesn’t specify which years should be used and Martian years are 687 days long, I’m pretty confident that the Supreme Court would rule that the Constitution means Earth years. But there’s no cite on that, so you could argue that either interpretation is possible.