The 20th Amendment and a Palin presidency

Saturday, September 06, 2008

The 20th Amendment and a Palin presidency

Sandy Levinson

The 20th Amendment, which is in fact both an interesting and an important modification of the original Constitution, says, in Section 3, the following:



So let's try to decode this against the possibility of a successful presidential candidate--i.e., the winner of the general election and a majority of the electoral votes-- dying before the actual tally of the electoral college vote in early January. The "president elect" shall presumably "have failed to qualify" because he/she is dead. So the new president would be the VP, but only until a new president shall be qualified. I.e., there doesn't seem to be a sound argument for the proposition that the VP would be entitled to a four-year term of office as president, as would be the case if the president died after the tally but before Inauguration. (Compare with the procedures of the 25th Amendment, which clearly provide for similar temporary "acting presidents" in case of temporary presidential disability.)

If there is confidence in the competence of the VP, there would be lots of pressure to figure out a way to make his/her term the "regular" presidential one. Thus, if something happened to Obama, I suspect there would be attempts to make Biden the "real" president and not simply an acting president, though I'm still not sure exactly how this would be done as a legislative matter. However, if Palin were the VP, I continue to find literally incredible the view that there would be anything approaching a national consensus to turn her from "acting" to "four-year." She would have no legitimate claim to the four-year office, unlike the case after the vote is tallied (with a live McCain being declared the president-elect). Given my own belief, I suspect shared by millions of others, that the presumptive Democratic majority should do whatever it can to find a more fit president, we would, at that moment, be in a genuine "constitutional crisis" and not only a "political crisis."

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/09/20th-amendment-and-palin-presidency.html

Thank you.

"Weekend at Bernie's" scenario to make sure that the barracuda gets the job..

are very specific that it be after January 20th. Preferably Jan 21 or 22nd.

Of course, we still need to make sure that this isn't even a possibility by making sure they lose.