It would seem that a unelected president can continue to become president by unelected means indefinitely.
I have wondered why the 22nd Amendment was drafted the way it was. The way to circumvent it is pretty obvious (a twice-elected President ascending from the Vice Presidency or even further down the chain of succession).
Whereas, if the intent was that no one may serve more than ten years as President, that’s easy enough to state without getting into the whole “elected” language.
This is what boggles my mind. The Congress and senate are full of legal beagles with real live law degrees, a shortage of “IANAL” types. You’d think that they could spot this obvious “third world dictator” loophole a mile away.
So then the president-for-life wanabee gets himself made Speaker of the house, and has his puppet prez and VP step down the day after the inauguration. If a president can become Chief Justice (Taft) presumably they could become Speaker. A Fun Fact® that’s been mentioned in the last few days is that anyone can be elected Speaker, they do not need to be a member of Congress.
Unfortunately it’s become painfully obvious that our system of government was built on (and only functions under) the assumption that all the players involved will act in good faith. There are so many gentlemen’s agreements, rules that aren’t really rules, and non-binding precedents that have never been properly codified, because it generally hasn’t been necessary. However, we can now see just how disturbingly fragile and powerless to reign in bad actors it actually is.
Replying to OP.
Nope. If that were true, we’d have President Obama now. And I believe there were many people that wanted Obama for Biden’s VP, but the consensus was that since he wasn’t available to be President, he was ineligible to serve as VP.
It’s not much of a loophole, since it lets the “dictator” only be in charge less than half the time, and even that depends on a long chain of other individuals willing to resign or die.
Succession skips over anyone ineligible to be President. This was relevant, for instance, when Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State: If the President, VP, Speaker, and Pres Pro Tem had all died, the Presidency would have gone to whoever was after her.
And on the electorate going along with it. This is assuming of course, that we have free and fair elections.
No. Every election, the dictator’s toadies get elected and resign the day after inauguration, passing the torch to him. So one day every 4 years, he is not in charge. While in charge during the lead-up to the election, do you not think the person pulling the strings from the presidential palace can if they choose with the appropriate control ensure a compliant electoral ticket, fix election results, etc.?
And then after two such terms, he’s out of office. The same as he’d have if he had normal terms.
Huh? In @md-2000’s hypothetical, said person was not elected more than twice and so the 22nd doesn’t apply. The amendment says nothing about who can SERVE as President.
It’s like the Yellowstone Zone of Death. They know about the loophole and they could easily fix it. But if they ignore it, it will never get used, right? So why bother to do minimal work.
I think @md-2000’s real question is why didn’t anyone spot the loophole when they wrote it and fix it then?
And I don’t think it’s so easily fixed these days. Even if most people from both sides of the isle think a particular amendment is a good idea, actually getting it passed is a not a trivial thing in these highly partisan days.
As always with legislation, the smaller the band-aid you apply to whatever problem you have, the less controversial it is. So the more likely it passes. Constitutional amendments are even harder to pass than ordinary legislation, so keeping the barriers to passage low is important.
A wholesale revisit of presidential qualifications, elections, and ironclad what-if flowcharts for every conceivable eventuality is nice to have. Maybe even need-to-have in our future. But hasn’t been important enough (yet) to spend the political effort and capital on.
The 22nd was crafted narrowly to prevent what FDR had just done from happening again. No more no less. IOW kill a couple of alligators, not drain the swamp.
Unless Truman felt like it.
True.
However that was the fairly typical grandfather clause that says “We’re changing something significantly, but not for folks already enrolled in the program. Just for the future as-yet unidentified newbies”.
And again one of the ways to improve the chances of legislation or policy changes getting passed is to insulate the folks with obvious vested interests from being affected by the proposed changes.
Part of our challenge as a society now is that “stuff” (of all natures) has gotten big enough, crowded enough, and extensive enough that darn near everybody has a vested interest in darn near anything. So the “no changes!” brigade is louder and more extensive than it was, e.g., 100 years ago.
Exactly. I suppose the only saving grace is that if the country is so far gone that someone can pull this off, getting their fake slate elected every 4 years, then it really doesn’t matter what the constitution says. After all, the people in the USSR had an amazing constitution that guaranteed them all sorts of rights under an elected government.
if you have control of enough states’ legislatures that they can designate their own slate of electors to take the electoral college and win the election - that’s all it takes. Does the constitution require the electors to be elected at large? IIRC some states just appointed them in the early days. Some states limited the vote to male white adult land owners…
That was necessary because they didn’t know when it would be ratified. Without it, it could have caused chaos by popping into existence during his third term and causing disputes about whether he was still president, or the day before the election with people suddenly afraid to cast a vote that might not count.