I’m not sure about that. For example, Judge Halsted L. Ritter was impeached by the House in 1936 and convicted on a single count of bringing the judiciary into disrepute (he was acquitted on six other articles). What specific law would that break?
While some of Judge Ritter’s behavior was certainly dubious, the conviction seemed to be more for a pattern of general misbehavior than any specific crime, and he was not convicted under any of the articles listing specific crimes such as income tax evasion. For example, one of the incidents cited was his allowing the receivers for a failed trust company to appoint his sister-in-law to manage one of the trust’s properties. Conflict of interest, scandal, lack of judgement, but not actually against the law.
But impeachment is for an offense of some kind. In the hypothetical, he is not the president, he cannot be the president. He doesn’t meet the basic qualifications laid out in the constitution. It’s not the subject of vote or opinion or if you like him. If he doesn’t meet the qualifications, he is not the POTUS. He is a fraud pretending to be POTUS.
Not having a president violates the Constitution too. So which violation do we chose? That we had no president? Or that the president was not eligible?
I maintain that what you’re bringing up is much more subjective. But someone either is or is not thirty-five years old. There is no leeway. The constitution doesn’t say “the President should be thirty-five”, or “ideally, it would be great if the President was thirty-five”. It says: “neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years.” You want to get around that qualification, change the Constitution. Otherwise, if someone under thirty-five manages to get elected, the election is a moot point. The Constitution holds it as an impossibility that some one under the age of thirty-five can occupy the office. (Using the age qualification as an example.)
Suppose the president says he is 35, and the other guy waves around a birth certificate that says he’s 34. It’s not unknown for a birth certificate to contain a typo, and every state has a process for correcting a certificate. (See, e.g., Kansas.)
Consider the case of Obama: there are still quite a few people who refuse to accept the certificate issued by the Hawai’i Dept of Health, and there are several phony birth certificates floating around the internet that purport to show him born in Kenya. Do you want a trial in the Senate as to which is correct, or do you want some military guy deciding the Kenyan certificate is real and brandishing weapons to remove Obama from the Oval Office?
Okay, but whomever you grant the authority to make that determination now has power over the presidency. I don’t see a workable remedy other than what is already in place, impeachment and removal by the Congress.
If you want to challenge someone’s eligibility to be president, do it before they’re elected. If someone is accepted onto the ballot by each state’s Secretary of State, gets enough votes, gets the votes of a state’s electors, gets those electoral votes accepted by Congress, and is sworn in by the Chief Justice, that doesn’t mean you haven’t found the right authority to challenge them, it means you’re wrong.
Who would be president? How would that person have ascended to office? There are only two ways so far in history: a president dies or steps down, or an election. We don’t have a precedent in law for a president who it turns out might not have been eligible when elected; it’s not clear whether he would need to be impeached first, or what.
I cite Logic. If the Constitution clearly lays out qualifications necessary for someone to be President, and a particular person does not meet those qualifications, that particular person cannot be President.
Wrong about what? That if it is a known fact that someone does not meet the qualification for the office of the president laid out in the Constitution, that that person cannot, in fact, be President? Just look at the Constitution. Tell me, how do you square someone holding the office who does not meet the qualifications?
Wrong about their eligibility. Truth is not handed down on stone tablets from some omniscient, unquestionable authority. Documents need to be examined, testimony weighed, and decisions made. A candidate goes through a lot of that on the way to becoming president, from people who are qualified and empowered to make those decisions. You don’t like what they decided? The Joint Chiefs don’t like what they decided? Tough.
How about the vice president? You know, the guy first in the line of succession.
If the American populace (or at least enough of them that Congress defers to their opinion) votes for the guy/gal knowing this person is not eligible, is it really up to Magellan (or Random Military Dude) that they can’t have the person they voted for?
In our nation’s history, lots of laws have been enacted and actions taken that were subsequently deemed unconstitutional, sometimes years or decades later. We have a system in place to remedy those wrongs to the extent possible. It’s not a perfect system, but it seems to be a heck of lot more reliable than letting Random Military Dude make the decisions.
It seems to me that if a majority of people want IneligiblePerson in office, staging what amounts to a coup to remove him/her/it is a heck of a lot bigger threat to democracy and the Constitution than letting IneligiblePerson serve out the term. Conversely, if a majority don’t want IneligiblePerson, then either said person never gets elected in the first place or they get impeached/convicted/removed.
What you don’t have is a procedure. Who makes that decision? The Speaker of the House? The Chief Justice? The Joint Chiefs of Staff? (The Editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal?)
Someone produces the birth certificate of doom. Now what? There likely would be Congressional hearings, with expert witnesses to say whether or not it’s real. Let’s say it’s real. Now what?
What, exactly, is supposed to happen? You say, “He’s not President.” Does the military oust him, as if we’re Argentina or something? Does the Speaker go over and throw him out bodily, just man-to-man, fists in the Rose Garden? What do you envision actually happening?
How does this become a “known fact,” though? I suspect you and I both agree that OJ Simpson is a murderer. But he was never imprisoned for murder, because despite the fact that he’s a murderer being widely known, the process by which one is legally demonstrated to be a criminal failed, and he was let free.
So, let’s say someone shows up with absolutely iron-clad, irrefutable proof that Obama was born in Kenya. You see it, and are convinced. I see it, and am convinced. You still need some sort of legal process whereby the state says, “We saw the evidence for this, and are convinced.”
For a sitting president, so far as I’m aware, the only legal process that can do that, is impeachment.
All the ideas directly contradict the Constitution. Since there has to be some mechanism to remove the sitting president if they don’t step down, impeachment seems most likely to me.