“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.
Well, to even BE the “President elect” the person would have had to be certified as the electoral winner.
For the President elect to fail to qualify even though the Vice President elect qualifies means that the disqualification must not have be related to the electoral vote.
The 20th Amendment mentions other scenarios such as you mentioned (Pres elect dies, Pres not chosen by the start of the term) separately from the “having failed to qualify” part so it must be something different than those scenarios.
The only scenarios I can think of that would make sense within the context is either if the President elect wasn’t old enough or hadn’t been a resident long enough by Jan 20th and the VP elect was to serve until the Pres elect WAS old enough or a resident long enough to qualify, or if the President elect had not yet PROVEN his qualifications and the VP elect would serve until the Pres elect could prove he was qualified (to “act as President until a President shall have qualified”).
Or the other qualification is the natural born citizenship requirement, so if a President elect either wasn’t a natural born citizen or had failed to prove he/she was a natural born citizen, the VP elect would act as President until the President elect had proven his/her natural born citizenship, or until the courts or Congress had provided another way for an eligible President to be chosen to replace the ineligible one.
The 12th Amendment talks about the VP acting as President in the case of “death or other constitutional disability of the President”, so treason, mental incapacity, impeachment, etc would all have already been covered without the 20th Amendment.
Those are the scenarios I can think of.