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In my view, the current status is that Obama is not President--he is not constitutionally eligible to hold the office. The immediate remedy is that his acts are not valid as the acts of the Commander in Chief or of the President.

The House reviewed the election results and determined that an eligible person had received a majority of the electoral votes as Vice President and that person was elected. The legal consequence of his election is that he is to serve as President until an eligible person is elected to that office.

As I have said on a number of occasions here, I remain of the view that the most likely party to force the issue is the military. I actually wonder what the Joint Chiefs and their attorneys at the Judge Advocate General's Office are thinking about--they don't have the cover of treaties and law for their actions; they all have personal liability (at least arguably).

Whether they act directly or indirectly by attempting to open negotiations with Congress over a proper remedy, you should expect that the military would ultimately take action.

The real legal remedy is that the House of Representatives suspends its rules and tables a motion to reconsider the vote affirming the election of Obama. Maybe there need to be hearings or investigation; maybe there would be other evidence. The House might even look at the evidence and decide that he was born in Hawaii and eligible.

Assuming the House reaches the conclusion we have--he was born in Kenya and not eligible, they have the remedy of telling the military to move him out of the White House if he doesn't move voluntarily. Biden continues to act as President pending certification of an eligible President.

At that point, under the 20th Amendment, the House is to choose among others receiving electoral votes. McCain is the only person who got such votes.

Now I know the McCain debate has been in process for some time--the actual legal is posted in several places here; complete with consideration of the various legislative acts and their impact on his status--anyone who wants to argue about it should at least look at the legal authorities that are applicable and be prepared to address them if they want to argue McCain's position.

The bottom line is that McCain is clearly not eligible either.

The only reports of actual tabulation of Electoral College vote I have seen show only McCain and Obama getting votes. At one point, I heard that a Texas electoral voter had cast his ballot for Ron Paul--that doesn't appear from any of the reported records and I assume it is not true.

I have done no research and have not considered the question of the options of the House of Representatives if no eligible candidate received votes.

David,

I agree with you about the military’s role in this and that it will be left up to them.

My guess all along has been that the military gets with the Supreme Court and they decide to give Biden the Oath of Office and escort Obama out of out the Building.

Biden names Hillary Clinton as Vice President.

John

The real legal remedy is that the House of Representatives suspends its rules and tables a motion to reconsider the vote affirming the election of Obama

Considering that the House has nothing to do with affirming electoral votes (that is the role of a once-in-four-years Special Joint Session), and since the action of that Joint Session was signed by the presiding officer, Richard Cheney of Wyoming, your ship has sailed.

My reading of that amendment is that the determination of eligibility is a one shot deal. Once he is determined to be eligible and sworn in as president, he can only be removed by impeachment. Otherwise there would be no need for impeachment and the role of the Senate could simply be cut out by the House of Representatives employing the stratagem of reviewing the matter of eligibility whatever it pleases.

Under this interpretation of the Constitution you would soon have tyranny by the House of Representatives intimidating the president into obedience.the House of Representatives would have the exclusive power of impeachment which is constitutionally only to be shared with the Senate.

I simply do not think that eligibility can be determined more than once by this method. It may be that eligibility can never again be determined by any method. That is, even though someone got to be president by committing fraud, even fraud against the Constitution, he nevertheless committed that fraud before he became president. There is a strong body of constitutional scholarship that says the president can only be impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors" committed while in office. Otherwise you would have the president being impeached for every misstep throughout his life and an opposition majority could tie a president up for his whole term.

I do not accept this argument but I am sure that the Democrats would make that argument and, like the Clinton impeachment, the idea is to kick up enough dust so that the public loses the thrust. I have outlined Bill Clinton's high crimes and misdemeanors in a previous post but the public saw it as merely a sex peccadillo and they did not wish to endanger their retirement accounts, so public opinion called for his acquittal and the Senate dutifully obliged. I agree with you that it is an anomaly to have a man in the oval office and have no constitutional or legal remedy to uphold the Constitution. That is the great principle and, as against this overwhelming truth, the idea that a high crime and misdemeanor must be committed in office as opposed to a means of getting in to office, must give way in any decent society.

One last caveat, I recall reading some very turgid article, perhaps a Law Review article, on the subject and it is not so simplistic as we are treating it.