My point is that thew person never really was President, as he/she didn’t meet the requirements clearly and unambiguously stated in the Constitution. Article II, Section 1:
So, someone who does not meet those requirements simply cannot be President. It does not say that a person must either satisfy the above OR get enough electoral college votes.
Doesn’t matter- once the House certifies the election and then you get sworn in, you ARE the President.
What qualifications you did or didn’t have previously aren’t relevant.
To you, sure. To reality, the will of the EC is binding, and need not be based on anything at all (legally, the electors could decide to hold a swimsuit competition or each flip a coin or whatever).
It’s been cited about 50 times. The mechanism for selection of a president is the electoral college. There is no other body which is empowered to decide if the president is qualified. Think of it as a the difference between a court’s factual finding of guilt and reality: you can be convicted of a crime you didn’t commit.
The Constitution also clearly and unambiguously says this: “The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President…The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President”. In other words, the President is whoever the Electoral College chooses.
Yes, he was. I realize I’m repeating a bunch of people here, but he was certified the winner, sworn in, signed laws, carried out military actions, and exercised all the powers of the job for (in this hypothetical) eight years. He wasn’t eligible by the Constitutional criteria, but that’s something that has be settled ahead of time, not afterward. At the time, he was president in every sense, and the Constitution doesn’t let you call take-backs.
Three US Senators were sworn in below the constitutional age requirement of 30 years.
Note the bolded text (although it’s a Wikipedia citation, I’d like to see a better one since a source isn’t given for it). There’s precedence for constitutional requirements being evaluated by the bodies in question. There’s no serious claim that legislation voted on by those three senators is null and void.
Yeah, otherwise the implications would be ridiculous. He could have accepted a bunch of bribes and then we try to convict him, he could say “hah, but I wasn’t really the President” and walk free. And what would you do, try everyone in the military for war crimes because the President never authorized any type of engagements? The list would go on forever and we’d spend the next 10 years and trillions of dollars concocting idiotic actions that hurt everyone and help no one. It might literally get to the point of digging holes and filling them back in.
Neither of us should even be entertaining this nonsense, no court of law would.
But all those steps were based on the assumption that he met the requirements. If he/she did not, then according to the Constitution he could not possibly be the President. I find it odd that the Constitution is crystal clear on this and you and others simply want to make believe the words aren’t there.
Now I agree it would be a nightmare of sorts, but so what? Better to with great difficulty adhere to the constitution than ignore it because it’s easy. I’m surprised that so many find it so easy to simply ignore the unambiguous language stating the requirements. No, the constitution does not supply a mechanism to correct this hypothetical wrong, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be remedied.
[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members…
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How might this apply to the discussion of President? As close as we could come would be to ask the members of that branch of government—the executive—who would be the new sitting President, e.g., Biden, Hillary, Rubio, etc. That comes the closest, doesn’t it? And, essentially, that’s what I’m saying.
Why do you insist that the person inaugurated wasn’t “really” the president? There’s a difference between a person who was the president even though they shouldn’t have been, and a person who never was the president.
If tomorrow Obama is revealed to be 34 years old, he would still be the president until he was removed from office by impeachment, or via the 22nd amendment.
He wouldn’t automatically be removed from office, the office would not be held to be unoccupied. It would be occupied, by Obama. It would not be the case that for the last 5 years the country didn’t have a president. We had a president.
As you say, the constitution doesn’t specify a remedy to right this particular wrong, so I find it hard to understand why you think the only constitutional answer is to act as if there was no president for the last 5 years.
If the fact that we’re talking about Obama is confusing you, feel free to imagine we’re speculating about Reagan being 34 years old when sworn in.
Anyway, the Constitution is pretty specific, see the bolded portion:
It then goes on to mention the residency and age requirements. However, it provides no mechanism for enforcement of those requirements, therefore enforcement is up to the Electoral College. If the Electoral College refuses to enforce the requirements then it would be up to Congress to impeach the president. If Congress doesn’t act, then whoever has the greatest number of votes from the electoral college shall be the president. Black and white.
I disagree. If one of the requirement for people to be married is that they are both at least 18, and then it is revealed after a year that the girl is 12, there marriage doesn’t have to be “undone”, it never happened. Nothing she might have agreed to as a minor, or as a “wife”, has any credence. They were never married. Now the court might take some steps to make it crystal clear that the marriage never happened, but that’s just making sure that the girl is completely free of the entanglement.
I’d say we had a person impersonating a president. That’s it.
I don’t say it’s the only one, it’s not, just the most logical one.
This has nothing to do with who the President might be.