Posted on 06/16/2024 9:36:37 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
There’s a fair amount of speculation these days about whom Trump will choose as a running mate. Guessing games can often attract a crowd. The names of Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio, along with even Donald Trump, Jr., are being bandied about.
There is a catch. It’s called the Twelfth Amendment: “The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.”
This particular clause did not change the Constitution. It was carried forward from Article II, Section 1 so as to maintain the same rule, in spite of the amendment, which changed the way in which the vice president was chosen. Originally, the veep was the second-place finisher in the Electoral College.
In the election of 1800, there was an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, so the House of Representatives chose Jefferson to be president and Burr to be vice president. Needless to say, they didn’t get along very well, so the Twelfth Amendment was ratified and took effect for the next election in 1804. On July 11 of that same year, Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.
Just to be clear, it is still possible for both the president and vice president to live in the same state, but the electors of that state cannot vote for both of them. For states such as Wyoming and Alaska, this doesn’t matter all that much. Florida, however, has thirty electoral votes, and that ain’t chopped liver. Texas has thirty-eight electoral votes. When Texas governor George W. Bush chose him to be his running-mate, Dick Cheney promptly quit his job at Haliburton in Houston and scooted back up to Wyoming to register to vote.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Those are awful choices.
He needs to pick someone who would, in his stead, carry out the platform he is running on.
It seldom works that a veep can carry a state the candidate otherwise would not have won, and the message to his base could well hurt him in turnout in more states.
Lee Zeldin of New York.
Glenn Youngkin of Virginia.
-PJ
It's no accident that in 2000 Al Gore lost both his home state of Tennessee and Clinton's home state of Arkansas.
Most people don't remember that if Gore had won either of them he'd have been president. The people of Tennessee and Arkansas rejected a Clinton "third term."
-PJ
Elise Stefanik.
Looks like it is going to be Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota. It’s a safe choice. I would have liked it to be Kristi Noem, but she had to mention animals.
The 12th amendment was about when 2nd place for president was then made vice president. We don’t elect a VP anymore we elect a President. He or she can select whoever they want from whatever state they want.
Matt “PitBull” Whitaker from Iowa is Trump2.0. He introduced PDJT at a Trump rally I attended in Dec2023 and really fired up the crowd.
He played football for IA and at one point was Acting Attorney General after Jeff Sessions left. Although he would make an excellant VP, I would love to see him the US AG.
Tell me you didn't read the article without telling me you didn't read the article.
Per Amendment XII, "we" -- well, the Electors actually -- most surely do elect the Vice President.
Gotta love all the FReepers who toss around their views of how the Constitution works without having any understanding of how the Constitution works. Some things never change. :-)
No good options. Tell that to Sarah Sanders, maybe she’ll have a change of heart. We are desperate for a running mate and she is a serious conservative who was a lion tamer of a press secretary.
This would be an extreme move . . . and it wouldn't actually be necessary if Trump really wanted Rubio. Per Amendment XII, both Trump and Rubio, despite being "inhabitants of the same state" (i.e., Florida) could appear on the GOP ballot as the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates respectively. Nothing on the face of Amendment XII would work to prohibit that.
Rather, what Amendment XII would do is prohibit Florida's 30 Electors for casting their votes for both Trump (as President) and Rubio (as Vice President).
So let's imagine that Trump wins in November, with 287 EVs to Biden's 251 (i.e., one of several plausible scenarios, with Trump recapturing GA and AZ, which he'd lost in 2020, while adding NV and PA). The 30 Florida Electors can't cast their votes for Rubio, yes, but that doesn't mean that Kamala Harris receives those votes. She still ends up with but 251. Rubio ends up with 257.
Since Rubio needs at least 270 EVs to be elected Vice President -- and, under this scenario, doesn't get them -- then, per Amendment XII, the choice of Vice President devolves to the U.S. Senate. If the GOP happens to have won control of the Senate following the 2024 election, then the Republican Senators can all vote for Rubio and he become Vice President anyway.
Easy-peasy. :-)
Maybe Lee Zeldin. Please, not Deep State Glen.
It was a simplification.. we meaning the voters not electors. You vote for the President of your choice and you assume his VP choice by doing so. The electoral college i.e. elect the President and VP.
Neither the Constitution nor the Electoral College prevents president from picking a VP from the same state. Electors can’t vote for both a President and VP from their same state.
Using the Bush / Cheney as an example, Cheney changed residence so the electors in Texas could also vote for him otherwise he’d have been in Texas and would have lost 32 electoral votes and we’d have had Gore and Lieberman.
The Twelfth Amendment was designed to avoid a repetition of the events of 1800 by having the electors vote separately for President and Vice President, with each elector casting one vote for each office. The Constitution’s original system at times could result, as it did in the election of 1796, in the selection of a President and Vice President with different political alignments, while the Twelfth Amendment simplified the process for selecting a President and Vice President from the same political party. The Supreme Court has thus stated that the Amendment “both acknowledged and facilitated the Electoral College’s emergence as a mechanism not for deliberation but for party-line voting.”
Since the Twelfth Amendment was ratified, Congress and the states have made other changes to presidential elections. Following the disputed election of 1876, Congress enacted a statute providing that if a state’s vote is not certified by the governor under seal, it shall not be counted unless both Houses of Congress concur. In addition, in 1933, the Twentieth Amendment superseded some provisions of the Twelfth Amendment.
Additionally:
“The Dems have over twice as many seats to defend.
Plenty of them are vulnerable.”
Except for West Virginia, all the potential Republican pickups are very close.
No, that's not how Amendment XII works. Under the scenario you lay out here, had Cheney remained an "inhabitant" of Texas, along with Bush, then Bush would have still ended up with the 271 EVs he did receive (following the brouhaha in Florida, that is), while Cheney would have ended up with only 239 (i.e., the 32 Texas Electors could not have voted for both Bush and Cheney, and, presumably, they would have cast their votes for Bush). Lieberman would have still ended up with 266 EVs.
But even though Lieberman would have had more EVs than Cheney, Lieberman still would have fallen short of the 270 EVs he would have needed to be elected Vice President. In that case, the selection of the Vice President would have devolved to the U.S. Senate, which would have then voted for which of the two men would be chosen. Per Amendment XII, the Senate would have been restricted to voting for either Cheney or Lieberman.
Funny thing is, though, following the 2000 election, when Congress convened on January 3, 2001, the Senate was split 50-50. And with no Vice President having yet been elected, there would have been nobody to break the tie had the vote ended 50-50! That would have been an entertaining scenario to see play out.
Trump needs to be looking for someone from a blue state.“
Zelden from NY would be pretty good choice he almost won the Governor in 22. Actually he probably did.
“He or she can select whoever they want from whatever state they want.”
{Sigh}. You just don’t get it. Yes, he can select whomever he wants from whatever state. BUT no state can vote for 2 of its own residents for both President and VP. So if Trump is a Florida resident and he picks another Floridian as his running mate, Florida can cast its electoral votes for Trump or his running mate but not both. This is a real thing whether you like it or not. And it matters. This is why Texan Dick Cheney changed his residency back to Wyoming in 2000.
This is the simplest thing in the world to solve: If Trump, currently a Florida resident, decides to choose someone else who is a Florida resident to be his Veep, then one of the two of them need to move from Floria. At a minimum, they can’t both be residents on the day on which the Electoral College votes; however, the much safer course of action would be for that person to establish residency in another state prior to the nominating convention, and to maintain that status until the inauguration.
As mentioned in the article, Cheney re-established his Wyoming residency a couple of days before the 2000 convention. Trump has a home in NYC (though one could certainly understand why he wouldn’t want to further expose himself there) and has a luxury golf resort in Bedminster, NJ where he could also establish residency. However, both of those are hostile jurisdictions, so he’d be better off buying or leasing a place in Texas, which has no income tax and is almost certainly not going to start up any lawsuits or prosecutions against him (nor try to take away his guns or right to carry).
Alternatively, of course, the Veep candidate could also establish residency elsewhere quite easily - but both Rubio and DeSantis may have political/legal reasons to remain FL residents until they official quit their present job on 1/20/25. They also have less financial resources with which to do this than Trump.
I do think people are at the point accept that 2017-2021 was a much better time in America.
Just say NO to RINO’s from Fla,SC, or NY.
I’m currently liking JD Vance but that skank DeWine would pick a RINO to fill the seat....................
Carson,Noem.Huckleby-Sanders may be decent alternatives.
.
Hope Trump will pick Graham to the UN just to get his sorry RINO butt out of SC!
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