I know the POTUS has a 10 year term limit.
But let’s say that a VP takes over upon a President’s death, serves as President for 1 year, runs for reelection **twice **and is elected to serve another 8 years for a total of 9 years …
Can the VP run a third time, serve 1 year, and drop out of office?
No. No more than a two-term President can run for part of a third term.
No. Once you’re elected twice, you can’t be elected again:
Given that the president can only be elected twice and that election is for 4 years, the basic limit is eight years, not ten. If a VP takes over due to death, resignation or impeachment+conviction, they can be re-elected for up to ten years, but if the second election would be for a term that exceeded the tenth year (ten years plus one day), they would not be eligible to run in that election.
Here is the relevant language from the constitutional amendment:
“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.”
The 22nd Amendment in essence sets a maximum possible incumbency at one day less than ten full years. You may only be elected President twice. If you have acceded to the Presidency from VP (or other office, such as Speaker). you maty run for reelection:
[ul]
[li]twice, if your time in office as President filling out the term of the previous president is less than two years; or[/li][li]once, if you served two years or more of the unexpired term.[/li]
There have been some hot debates in GD in the past about whether a person ineligible to be elected President owing to the 22nd Amendment may be appointed VP under the provisions of the 25th, and accede to the Presidency in due course.
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That does pose an interesting question. Of course, the appointment has to go through the Senate, so the likelihood of the president evading the 25th amendment this way seems pretty slim. But since the amendment never mentions the eligibility of the VP, theoretically, the expired president could take the bottom of the ticket, if the people would stand for that (e.g., Bush/Reagan '92).
But the 12th Amendment discusses the eligibility qualifications of a Vice President: “But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.” I’d say that being ineligible to be elected President makes you ineligible to be President and therefore ineligible to be Vice President. There are people who argue otherwise but their reasoning is pretty byzantine.
Ah, good, I failed to see that. The fact that our laws must be subjected to semantic abuse based on the exact wording is absolutely detestable.
I’m not sure that just reading the 22nd Amendment and seeing that it clearly mentions elections several times and qualifications for office zero times is a “byzantine” argument.
I’m not saying the end result makes sense, just that it’s a perfectly reasonable reading of what was actually written down.
I’m not seeing where you get the “one day less” bit. Also, are you sure about the accession to the presidency. IIRC, the Constitution requires a veep candidate to be eligible for the presidency.
It requires that the VP be eligible “to the office of president.” Whether that means that the VP also has to be eligible to be elected president is unsettled, and unless something bizarre happens it will always be unsettled.
Note also that a person could theoretically be elected to the office of Vice President an arbitrary number of times, with the elected President dying or resigning just after the two-year mark each time, and thus the elected VP could end up serving just under two years in a large number of terms.
Please give an example of a real-world law that is not dependent on the exact wording.
There’s actually no two-year restriction for that.
Say Abelson/Xavier get elected and Abelson has a fatal heart attack boogying at the inaugural ball. Xavier takes over for 4 years. Next election, Xavier runs again for VP, this time in the Borg/Xavier ticket. Borg suffers an anaphylactic shock to something in the punch at the inaugural ball. Xavier again takes over for 4 years. Repeat indefinitely until Xavier runs out of vict… er … running mates or is not reelected.
Since Xavier never gets elected Pres, he’s always eligible to run at least once for Pres. Thus he’s also eligible to be VP.
nm. I just said what the post above mine said. Better than I did. 
I disagree. The plain text makes a distinction between be eligible to BE President versus being ELECTED President. It probably was an oversight by the drafters, but rules are rules.
That’s the kind of byzantine reasoning I was talking about.