Oaths are taken by the individual, not administered to the individual. An oath is still an oath when it is administered by no one. If a certain oath must be witnessed by a certain person or group, that makes sense. Maybe that’s what the law is referring to - who is considered qualified to witness an oath on behalf of the country.
In the case of a US president taking that oath under normal circumstances, it’s a public event with many witnesses, so choosing one witness as the official one is either superfluous, or insulting to the public (who are each one official witnesses since they did the electing), depending on how you look at it.
Yes, just as it says the president shall give Congress information on the state of the union, and refrain from collecting a paycheck from one of the states. That doesn’t mean there’s necessarily a legal remedy if he fails to do those things.
It just says the president should take the oath before “enter[ing] on the Execution of his Office.” Executing the office is separate from holding it.
I’ve even seen (purposefully pedantic) arguments that the oath doesn’t count if it’s taken at 11:59 (as often happens), because the Constitution says the president shall take it, not the president-elect.
Technically, I suppose… but being president and being unable to take any action on anything (just because you haven’t publicly said you’ll do your best) might get a bit frustrating.
Yes, that’s what I’m getting at. Political remedies like impeachment, refusal to take up the president’s nominations, refusal to deal with the president legislatively, scandalmongering, etc.
I agree, I’m just saying that the requirement might stand on its own rather than having some cascading legal effect that could result in the invalidation of the presidency. Parents are required to register births, but that doesn’t make a baby an un-person if it doesn’t have a birth certificate.
Like, if a president who hadn’t taken the oath purported to sign a bill passed by Congress (let’s say Congress adjourns nine days later so it wouldn’t have taken effect automatically), is the president’s lack of an oath a defense to having violated that law? It couldn’t hurt to try but I don’t think it’s clear that it would work.
No. Oaths are both taken and administered. That’s why the laws I linked to above go to great lengths to empower certain individuals to administer oaths.
I suppose there’s some value in ensuring that the oath taken was the proper one. Whatever ritualistic aspects of oath taking that once existed the important part left over is a verbal contract between the oath taker and the state and getting the wording right could be important in some narrow circumstances.
However, I do not see any point in having an official administrator of oaths in a time when an oath can simply be recited in front of witnesses, and that recitation can be recorded, or the oath taken by a witnessed signing of a document. Actually a witnessed signature on a document would be much better proof that the proper oath was taken than any oral version.
I suppose the designation of authorized oath-takers was mostly a matter of simplifying things by having a person who’d be responsible as a matter of duty before the authorities to be the stand-in for the Public Trust.
In fact, most of the times I’ve had to take an oath for the purposes of public employment or duty it only involved a countersigned document. But I can only imagine the twitstorm if someone were sworn in for high public office that way, given that we are in a world where flipping one phrase’s wording with NO effect on the meaning of the sentence in the spoken oath at the public ceremony results in a repeat it later in the afternoon so people will shut up. The accusations of how that page and those signatures were faked and that the parties never even looked at what they were signing would be flying within minutes.
