The 20th Amendment says that if a President elect has “failed to qualify” by Jan 20th the Vice President elect is to “act as President until a President shall have qualified.”
So whether Obama is or isn’t the President is irrelevant to the issue of whether he can authorize combat operations.
To even BE the “President elect”, Congress had to already have certified him as the electoral winner. So the issue of “qualifying” is at that point beyond any authority or power that Congress has, if they ever even HAD any authority to judge someone’s Presidential qualifications.
IOW, even after the states are done with their role and after Congress is done with its role, there is still the hurdle of “qualifying”, which must be accomplished by Jan 20th if not before. There is no other branch of government that is given any authority or responsibility to determine whether the President elect and VP elect have “qualified” by Jan 20th. Therefore the Third Article applies, which says that all cases and controversies arising out of the Constitution or the law are to be decided by the federal judiciary.
There are cases within the federal judiciary that raise the issue of whether Obama can “act as President” according to the 20th Amendment. Only the federal judiciary - not the military - can decide those cases.
Lind has allowed the military to usurp the role of the federal judiciary. The military can’t interpret the Constitution and judge in matters of fact between Obama and Biden, to say which is to “act as President”. Furthermore, the military can’t decide whether Obama and Biden were ever even LAWFULLY declared to be the winners of the electoral vote, since Cheney didn’t ask for objections as required by law.
Article 92(1) - under which Lakin was charged - says that an order is not lawful if it is contrary to the Constitution. If the Constitution requires Joe Biden to “act as President”, then the authorization for Lakin’s deployment order was unconsitutional, thus making the order itself unauthorized.
The point: the Constitutionality of the authorization for the troop surge is critical to the lawfulness of Lakin’s deployment order.
When Lind denied Lakin the opportunity to defend himself on the grounds of unconstitutionality and unauthorized orders, she violated his due process and Sixth Amendment rights.
Regardless of how he pleaded, she denied him those rights, and that should allow him to file a lawsuit, if there’s any justice left in this country, which is probably not likely at this point.
What part of "pleaded guilty and admitted under oath that his orders were lawful" don't you understand?
“The 20th Amendment says that if a President elect has “failed to qualify” by Jan 20th the Vice President elect is to “act as President until a President shall have qualified.”
Just curious...what do you think the 20th Amendment means by “fail to qualify”?
I’m not trying to set you up. From what I’ve read, it seems the meaning is uncertain. The link below is how the Congressional Research Service answered it - with a non-answer.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS22992.pdf
It seems to me to envision that the President-elect will be unable to serve for some reason (anything from underage to treason to resignation prior to inauguration, etc), and no suitable candidate has been installed to replace him. Apparently the political parties can install a replacement if a candidate dies between the popular vote & Electoral College vote, and the EC voters bound to the dead man may or may not be allowed to vote for anyone they wanted.
So if Obama had died on Nov 22, 2008, the Democrats would need to decide who would replace him (they would not have been required to default to Biden). If that candidate didn’t win a majority of the EC vote in Dec, then the President would have failed to qualify and Biden WOULD be installed as President until the party and EC figured out what to do.
Now, I’m a retired EWO/WSO and not a lawyer, so anyone with better info jump in. But what it doesn’t mean is that if you have a suspicion that the President, already sworn in, is underage or not a NBC, then he has failed to qualify. Even if you have proof, he would remain President (I think) until Congress removed him.
The 20th Amendment was passed in a year, and it doesn’t seem to have been well thought out.