The 22nd amendment states “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.”
Quantifying that, if he won in 2020, that would mean that he’s been elected more than twice, making this upcoming term invalid. Couldn’t the Democrats just say that he won in 2020, and then tell him he can’t be president this time? What would be the repercussions to what Biden has done if that were to happen? What else am I missing? I’m hoping the hive mind here can help me be better informed.
D’oh. I only thought the rest of the comment and then submitted as it was because I needed to go find the text to copy.
And from the 12th amendment:
You can only be elected president twice. If you serve more than two years of someone else’s term you can only be elected once. If you can’t be president you can’t be vice president.
So if you’re elected once, then serve as VP and the president goes away and you serve as president for 2 years and a day, you’ve already been elected once so you can’t run again, and you can’t be VP because you can’t be the president.
If you’ve been elected twice you can’t be VP, so you can’t get any extra time that way.
Since the 22nd amendment only explicitly bars you from being elected, it could be argued that you still meet the eligibility requirements laid out in Article II; that is, you’re only explicitly barred from being elected, not from holding office.
https://quickapedia.com/answer/what-are-the-constitutional-requirements-for-becoming-a-u-s-vice-president/
We’ve definitely seen some very concerning Supreme Court rulings recently, so it’s unfortunately not as clear-cut as we would hope.
I feel like if we get to that point, we’ve given up on the constitution. “He can’t run for president because he’s term limited, but he’s still eligible to be president, therefore we can make him vice president so the president can resign and he can be president” is such an abuse of the term “eligible” where you turn “cannot be elected but otherwise good to go” into “eligible to be in the highest elected office in a Democratic government”.
If the way it’s written isn’t clear cut enough then the court would find a way to say anything wasn’t clear cut.
Yes, but some constitutional literalists tend to be quite … literal.
“The authors of the 22nd amendment clearly knew the difference between holding office and being elected to office, because the text of the amendment distinguishes between the two, yet still chose to explicitly only bar from election.”