No way- Cheney has no authority today to decide what did or didn’t happen in the past.
Courts would have to rule.
Courts would decline to rule.
Live would go on.
The idea that everything Obama signed becomes null and void is just mot feasible. There’s a certain logical appeal to it, but the ramifications of declaring a do-over on the last five years of government are massive, destructive, far reaching, and stupendously expensive.
What I’d expect to happen here would be two things. First, whoever is currently president makes a big show of reauthorizing everything Obama has signed. I’d expect this to happen regardless of which party controls the White House. Otherwise, they get to spend their entire time as president trying o sort this shit out, and I don’t see anyone wanting that headache. Secondly, I imagine the SCOTUS would step in, much like they did in 2000, and rule that laws signed by Obama remain laws, for the overall good of the country.
Undoing the second gulf war will be a lot of work. And reinstating Saddam Hussein is going to stink.
I think that Miller’s notion that SCOTUS would have to step in is correct.
Numerous federal courts have already held that a presidential candidate’s qualifications are a nonjusticiable political question. What’s the difference here? Who would have standing to sue?
Don’t know what you’re talking about here. Can you explain?
In order to contest something, you have to show that it directly harmed you. You can’t just sue on behalf of the common good or to prove some point. As a general rule, courts have held that people cannot sue over an election result just on the basis that they live in the area where the election was held. The outcome of an election isn’t considered to be direct harm to anyone living in the area. You can’t argue “I’m harmed by living in a country where Barack Obama is President rather than John McCain.”
Sorry, yes. Every federal court that heard one of the Birther lawsuits came to the same conclusion: the Article II qualifications are not a matter for determination by a court of law. One problem is standing, which Little Nemo’s post explains relatively well. However, that’s not an absolute bar; there were people who had standing to challenge Obama’s election (or at least his nomination or place on the ballot), but chose not to. McCain, for example.
The bigger problem is that eligibility for public office is what SCOTUS calls a “political question”. In other words, it’s one that courts should decline to consider because the Constitution already provides some other process for deciding them. SCOTUS has called this “[textually] demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department.” In this case, it’s voting and the electoral college mechanism. Nothing in Article III suggests that the Supreme Court has the authority to determine if a candidate for president is qualified to hold office.
And you don’t want to improvise the solution to this problem on the fly. I can see the logic to magellan01’s idea, but that’s what he’s proposing. There are no legal provisions to do any of those things, so you can’t just start doing them.
Just to be clear, is everybody in the thread in agreement that “qualifications” and “eligibility requirements” are being used as interchangeable terms?
Personally, based upon his performance, I consider that President Obama has demonstrated his qualification for the Presidency quite adequately, whatever hypothetical nightmares might turn out to be true.
Conversely, I don’t consider GWB to have been qualified to do much more than eat a pretzel.
The fact of the matter is that, if we found out that George Bush was actually 34 when he took the oath of office, it would not automatically void all of his actions. You can’t undo the Iraq War, can you?
Every law signed by Bush, every appointment, every administrative decision made by his subordinates would stand, unless explicitly repealed by either actions of the current executive branch, or legislation passed by congress.
Just like if you get married, and later it turns out that the officiant at the wedding was not really a priest, but an underage Elvis impersonator dressed as a priest, your marriage is not annulled. You are not required to get remarried, your are not required to pay extra back taxes for filing jointly, you don’t have to pay back life insurance payouts, or social security benefits. You were married, even though the person who solemnized your marriage was not authorized to solemnize marriages.
This is a matter of settled law. Maybe Congress would pass a law that says “All decisions made by fakeBush are hereby retroactively ratified”, just to make things clear, but it is obvious that such a law would be redundant and only done to keep people from being confused.
I’m not sure that someone suing due to harm is the only way to go. I would think that congress could bring up the issue, couldn’t they? If not, would an individual who could claim harm as a result of a specific bill signed by the President sue? Would that constitute standing? If so, couldn’t each piece of legislation be thusly challenges?
I just can’t see how we could have someone elected to the highest office in the country, but is barred from holding that office by the Constitution, and the only thing to be done is a collective, “Oh, well.”
:rolleyes:
How, though? The Constitution doesn’t give them the power to void a presidency, and I’m not sure the Democrats would go along with a plan that would undo everything Obama did or give a Republican a chance to get rid of every part of it he or she didn’t like.
I can. It’s an absurdly unlikely series of events, so the Constitution doesn’t provide for a way to deal with it and the government has never set up a way to handle it.
Once you are President, you stay that way until impeached, until the end of your term(s).
That’s what it says in the Constitution. There’s nothing about retroactive disqualification.
That’s sort of what I was wondering when I posted the OP - because if that really is the case, then why do/did people get so worked up over it, and why were people so worked up over after Mr Obama was sworn in? From the sounds of it, once he finished the oath he was in and that was that.
I think the time to address ineligible candidates is at the State level. The requirements for Federal office are spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, but the work of actually accepting a candidate’s application to get on the ballot is done on a State by State basis. If enough States accept a candidate as a valid candidate for the office of President such that the person can (and does) win a majority of EVs then I think that’s basically the end of the legal eligibility argument.
That raises the question of what would happen if in some fantastical scenario a bunch of States chose to deliberately ignore plain textual requirements spelled out in the Constitution. Say they all accept a 25 year old as a Presidential candidate. While the courts don’t tend to feel there is much place for them in questions of candidate eligibility, they might do something in such a case of extreme blatant disregard for the constitutional requirements of office. But that’d be before the officer was sworn in. By the time all the EVs are counted and the swearing in has happened I don’t think our judicial branch would be willing to rule a President “invalid”, I think they’d view it as a matter to be dealt with by the legislature as they saw fit (ex: impeachment in the case of a sitting ineligible President and reversing legislation they had a problem with in the case of a President who leaves office and reveals his secret ineligibility.)
Out of curiosity, which way do you think they would jump in this regards? Is there any chance that, assuming the hypothetical situation in the OP, some might look at Obama’s presidency and say “well, that wasn’t too bad, considering..” and feel that, rather than tighten up regulations, they could loosen then by amending Clause 5 to remove both the 35yo age requirement* and the ‘natural born’ wording? ( and leaving it open for all citizens and the chance of President Schwarzenegger after all! 
)
- This always struck me as being strange - what other federal jobs are not available to adult citizens under 35 (other than by the usual standards of lack of education / experience / talent etc..)?
Well, senators must be at least thirty, and representatives twenty-five. Not sure otherwise.
Senators have to be 30 and Representatives have to be 25.
ETA: ninja’d.