The usual example here was Alexander Hamilton. He was born outside what would become the United States, immigrated to America, and was an American citizen at the time the Constitution was enacted. He was therefore eligible to run for President.
If there is a foreign-born Sec of State (Albright, Kissinger) they are not in the line of succession for president. They are simply skipped over. I imagine the same would be true if a SoS (or any cabinet sec) was under 35. What is the reasoning why the same criteria wouldn’t apply to a VP who served two full terms already? Is it the wording of the 22nd amendment as referenced below?
I think the counter-argument is that the “natural born Citizen” clause in Article II is a requirement for holding the office of president, but the “you can’t be elected president more than twice” clause in the Twelfth Amendment is a requirement to be elected president.
No, that’s just making a distinction about what it says and doesn’t say. Here’s the wording of the relevant part:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and 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.
Outside the quote box, let me bold the relevant word: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
Like I said, there are two paths to the Presidency: election and succession. Richard Nixon got there (much to our chagrin) by election, and Gerald Ford became President by succession.
The 22nd Amendment places no restriction or limitation on succeeding to the Presidency. So there’s no reason to believe that it made the succession path ineligible to anyone who wasn’t already ineligible. How can that not be obvious?
Before the 22nd Amendment was ratified, the universe of people who could be elected to the Presidency and the universe of people who could succeed to the Presidency were one and the same. Now they’re not. The latter universe hasn’t changed. The 22nd Amendment doesn’t say a 2-term President can’t succeed to the Presidency, just that he can’t get elected. So a 2-term former President is, in the language of the 12th Amendment, “constitutionally eligible to the office of President.” So the 12th Amendment doesn’t exclude him from being elected Veep.
The 12th Amendment’s relevant part says:
no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
Here is an opinion piece from the National Review arguing that the 22nd amendment wouldn’t allow a 2 term president to serve as VP. But frankly, it’s a pretty unconvincing argument.
I’m assuming the Supreme Court, if it rejects the right of a state’s Secretary of State to reject a candidate from their state’s ballot, would feel no responsibility to designate the appropriate path for a candidate to be rejected according to the 14th Amendment. In other words, “Nuh-uh. Try again” would be the essence of their negative response.
This question of “standing” troubles me. I don’t see why I, as a registered voter, shouldn’t be able to sue to get someone’s name off the ballot. I might not win, and it would cost me a lot of money, but why don’t I have the standing to sue?
Hmmm…14th Amendment, not 22nd or 12th. I’m gonna guess you meant to post in another thread, perhaps this one?
Which was almost certainly sloppy writing, and it remains an open question how a court would rule on it. But as I understand it, the scholarly consensus is that the intent was clear, and that someone ineligible to be elected President is also ineligible to be VP.
To me, that’s crazy, unless the legislative history is clear as crystal.
It wasn’t like they couldn’t take the time to spell out their meaning before sending it to the House, the Senate, and the state legislatures. This set of words is what everyone ratified. If the writers meant something different from what they wrote, then they goofed.
Absent some really clear legislative history, my take would be that few people involved in this were even thinking about whether a two-term President could later become veep, and potentially succeed to the Presidency.
I’d bet a good chunk of money that there’s no evidence that even a half-dozen state legislatures even considered that possibility - and their intent, or lack of it, counts too. It’s not in the Constitution without them.
Clearly not, or they would have avoided the sloppy wording they used. Not considering something doesn’t mean they intended that something.
I think that’s really straining the language of the text. I would argue that being constitutionally ineligible to be elected President makes you constitutionally ineligible to be President. I don’t feel there was any intent to create a backdoor means to become President.
Good guess. Sorry for the hijack.
Not immediately. Hamilton wasn’t old enough the first time there was an election. IIRC.
Ronald Reagan asked Gerald Ford to run as his VP; Ford declined.
Has there ever been a former president invited to be VP? If there has, I’m thinking it would be before the passage of the 22nd, given that there were few 1-termers since, and I’m pretty sure Carter and Bush, pere, were never invited to be running mates.
Oh, and no one will ask Trump to be a running mate while he’s conducting his own campaign.
Not considering something means they intended neither that thing or its opposite.
OK, so we’re in agreement that the writers of the 22nd Amendment didn’t consider the possibility of a former President becoming Vice President. But if someone had asked them, do you really think that they would have said “Well, if you do it that way, that’s clearly hunky-dory”? No, they’d have said “That’s obviously not what we want either.”. And maybe then have changed the wording, if they weren’t idiots.
Maybe excluding Hoover was all that they wanted. If GW turned out to be alive would they really have wanted the amendment to be applied?
This might show a similar reaction to his appearance: “I thought you were dead”
Sure, let’s stipulate that. Hoover wasn’t very popular, after all. But my question was about the how, not the who. If you had asked any of the drafters of the amendment “Well, should Hoover be allowed to become Vice President and then succeed to the Presidency?”, would they have said “Well, yes, it’s OK for him to become President again that way, as long as he’s not elected”?
Well, that would sure open up a whole new field of Constitutional interpretation. “Nobody asked the Founders about this, but if they’d thought of it, they surely would have said X, Y, and Z, after all, they weren’t idiots.”
It’s a fair argument. A counter-argument would be that the 22nd Amendment interferes severely with an existing constitutional right, namely, the right to be elected to an office for which the candidate would otherwise be eligible. I think it’s a good rule of statutory (in this case, constitutional) interpretation that where pre-existing rights are interfered with, you interpret such a provision narrowly and stick to its wording, rather than enquiring what the drafters would have thought but didn’t put into writing.