The enclosed article adds the Electoral College to the eligibility question. As an average American, I am more confused than ever. I just cant see how the Electoral College takes precedence over the Eligibility Clause: Article II 5: No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States. Looking back at Chester A. Arthur the thing that stands out is that the Electoral College has never concerned itself with Article II: Section 5 nor has anyone else for that matter. Bruce Walkers piece says this: The transformation of the Electoral College into slavish ciphers and not serious officials and the rise of political parties and the imaginary "popular vote" has contorted the process of electing presidents into something very different from what the Founding Fathers intended. I cant shake the feeling that ignoring presidential eligibility is where Al Gore first got the idea of No controlling legal authority. The whole thing could backfire if the issues of duel citizenship, and a foreign born parent(s) is not settled. For example: Suppose a sufficient number of electors decide that VP nominee Marco Rubio is not eligible after the Republican party ticket wins the popular vote. What happens then? Also, since electors are creatures of individual states what happens when some states enact strict ballot-eligibility laws? Do electors in every state have the constitutional authority to throw out the popular vote and elect a person who was kept off the ballot in their state? If so, that would create a much more complex Electoral College crisis than the one in 1877: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/182343/Electoral-Commission Finally, along with the Founding Fathers et al., I am not a big believer in democracy: Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. H. L. Mencken Obviously, democracy stands and falls on the popular vote. So how has that been working out for the country? Especially since the XVII Amendment? September 15, 2011 The Presidential Qualification Issue By Bruce Walker Marco Rubio is on most short lists for the Republican vice presidential nomination. The principal objection many conservatives have is whether Rubio is constitutionally eligible. How should we view this issue? At the outset, we need to dispose of the idea that the Constitution contemplates political parties nominating candidates to run for president or vice president. It does not. Both president and vice president are elected by a special constitutional body, the Electoral College. The members of that college are under no obligation to vote for any person to be president or vice president. If a Perry-Rubio ticket swept all fifty states, the Electoral College could instead, quite properly, elect Al Franken and Maxine Waters to be president and vice president. In recent presidential elections, some electors have shown their constitutional independence. In 1972, Nixon "carried" Virginia, and yet one of that state's electors voted for John Hospers. In 1960, all the popularly elected delegates in Mississippi were "unpledged." We are used to thinking in terms of "popular vote" for "candidates" of "parties." Constitutionally, these terms mean nothing at all. Electors are chosen by the method established by the state legislature. Until 1824, those electors were not chosen by the people at all, so if you want a good trivia question, ask someone for the popular vote in the 1820 presidential election (there is none.) But look at the 1824 election and the birth of "popular vote." Six states -- South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Delaware, New York and Vermont -- had no popular vote for presidential electors at all. South Carolina continued that practice right up to the Civil War. After the Electoral College selects whomever a majority of its members want to be president and vice president, the role of Congress is very limited. In case of a tie in the Electoral College or if no person receives a majority of the votes in that body, then the House elects the president and the Senate elects the vice president. The House can impeach a sitting president and the Senate can remove that president after a trial, but those powers must find misconduct while in office. Article I, Section 1 also provides a means to remove a president if there is an "Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of said Office." The 25th Amendment, which sets up this congressional power, is clearly intended to cover sickness or mental instability and, crucially, it provides for the president to resume the powers of his office when he is sound. Congress, then, has no role in determining who is eligible to be president. Does the federal judiciary have a role, then? The scariest remark that I have read by conservatives is that federal courts have some role in judging the qualifications of someone chosen by the Electoral College. Federal courts' jursidiction, including the Supreme Court (except for a few narrow powers of original jurisdiction), are only what Congress confers upon the courts. Beyond that, the Supreme Court could not even exist in our nation until the president and Congress are elected: when Washington was president and the first Congress was elected, there was no federal judiciary at all, and there could not have been until someone was elected president. So how is this issued resolved? Consider how the Constitution deals with the eligibility of persons to be elected to the House or the Senate. Article I, Section V provides that the "Each House shall be the judge of its own Returns, Elections and Qualifications of its Members." What does that mean? If a 23 year old is elected to the House of Representatives then once the House determines he is qualified for the office, that constitutional issue is resolved. Presidential electors ought not to choose as president anyone who is not eligible for that office, but once it has elected a president, the constitutional issue is resolved...unless we want to invent extra-constitutional powers in the federal judiciary so that it can determine who may be president and who may not. If the Electoral College acts irresponsibly, then the constitutional remedy is through state legislatures who may change completely how these electors are chosen. There is a final check, of course, and that is the integrity of the person assuming the presidency or vice presidency. The oath of office implicitly includes a promise to adhere to Article II, Section 1. No ineligible person can honorably take that oath of office. I realize how unsatisfactory this seems. The transformation of the Electoral College into slavish ciphers and not serious officials and the rise of political parties and the imaginary "popular vote" has contorted the process of electing presidents into something very different from what the Founding Fathers intended. What could be done to change this? State legislatures could begin to choose the presidential electors again, restoring states' rights and ending voter fraud. We could amend the Constitution to provide for announced candidacy and a preliminary determination of eligibility by some body. Or we can, as conservatives quite properly have done, make the qualifications issue a real political issue. But unless we really want to open the Pandora's Box of Supreme Court meddling, we are stuck with what the members of the precise instrument of choosing a president -- the Electoral College -- does. http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2011/09/the_presidential_qualification_issue.html
Pat Buchanan asks this question of democracy: One wonders: How is it that this childlike faith endures? The answer to Pats question is rooted in two eternal truths: 1. Democracy is the preferred form of government for parasites. 2. Every generation produces a superabundance of fools who insist a benign totalitarian government is possible. Socialism, that most loathsome of secular religions, is the latest formula for implementing those two truths. Unfortunately for fools and parasites the Garden of Eden is the only Socialist paradise known to man because no one had to work for a living. Pat Buchanan The Democracy Worshipers 9/16/2011 "Your people, sir, is ... a great beast." So Alexander Hamilton reputedly said in an argument with Thomas Jefferson. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Hamilton explained: "Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship." In his column, "Democracy Versus Liberty," Walter Williams cites Hamilton, James Madison and John Randolph, who wrote of "the follies and turbulence" of democracy, and John Adams: "Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." Yet what our fathers feared we embrace. For it may fairly be said of this generation that it worships democracy. Indeed, the fanaticism of this faith in democracy as the path to worldly salvation causes many to hail any and all revolutions against any and all autocrats. One wonders: How is it that this childlike faith endures? After all, the French Revolution gave us the Terror and Napoleonic wars. The Russian Revolution gave us Lenin, Stalin and 70 years of totalitarian horrors. Mao's revolution put 30 million Chinese in early graves. Cuba's revolution gave us an end to freedom and 50 years of Fidel's cult of personality. Iran's revolution that took down the Shah raised up the Ayatollah. One would think we would have learned a little skepticism. Yet no sooner had the crowds in Tunis turned out their autocrat and the throngs taken over Tahrir Square in Cairo than our giddy elites were proclaiming the "Arab Spring" and demanding the United States get on the side of the Arab street against all autocrats. Yet Hosni Mubarak, though a ruthless ruler, had been our man in Cairo since the assassination of Anwar Sadat, fighting alongside us in the Gulf War, keeping the peace with Israel, allying with us in the war on terror. But as soon as the tide turned against him, we ditched him and cheered on the crowd in Tahrir Square, a few of whom celebrated the downfall of despotism with a sexual mauling of Lara Logan. What our democracy-worshipers, our "power-to-the-people" lovers of revolution fail to understand is that revolutions unleash all the forces in a society, including the most noxious. Indeed, especially them. To understand what revolutions and popular democracy are likely to produce, we need to understand the fires in the minds of the men who create or capture those revolutions. And neither Africa nor Arabia offers much in the way of hope. The overthrow of Ian Smith's government in Rhodesia brought to power Robert Mugabe and his Mashona, who proceeded to massacre the Matabele of rival Joshua Nkomo, rob the whites of their property, drive them out of their country and create the hellhole that is Zimbabwe. Yet such is the power of democracy worship, this secular religion, to blind people to the evidence of their own eyes that virtually every Western leader favored one-man, one-vote democracy in Rhodesia. As we see in Julius Malema, that admirer of Mugabe and 30-year-old firebrand of Mandela's ANC, just convicted of a hate crime for his singing of the anti-apartheid ditty "Shoot the Boer!" who wants to expropriate South Africa's mines and confiscate white farms, racism and tribalism are alive and well in liberated Southern Africa. And democracy is their enabler. To know what the Arab Spring is likely to produce, one needs to look not only at the Kerenskys who lead the Facebook-Twitter revolutions, but the Lenins and Trotskys who stand silently behind them. The Arabs of Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain want new leaders to reflect the popular will. And what is that will? In the most recent elections, an Islamic party took power in Turkey. The Muslim Brotherhood advanced dramatically in Egypt. Hezbollah and Hamas were vaulted to power in Lebanon and Gaza. Democratists who demand we distance ourselves from the kings of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and Bahrain, who do they think will replace these monarchs? Do they care, or is democracy the right way, results be dam-ned? In liberated Libya, reprisals are being perpetrated against the black Africans Moammar Gadhafi brought into the country, and the Islamists are surfacing. In liberated Iraq, it is Muslim vs. Christian, Sunni vs. Shia, Arab vs. Kurd. In Sudan, it was Arab Muslim against African animist and Christian that tore the country in two. In Ethiopia, it was the ethnic Eritreans who seceded to establish a country of their own. Looking at Africa and the Middle East, men seem willing to march for a better life and to demonstrate for democracy. But when it comes to fighting and dying, the calls of race, religion and tribe alone seem capable of compelling the ultimate sacrifice. Before we endorse the right of all peoples to have what they want, perhaps we should know what they want. For in the Mideast, it appears that most would like to throw us out and throw our Israeli friends into the sea. http://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2011/09/16/the_democracy_worshipers
No states will enact "strict ballot-eligibility laws", despite birther masturbatory fantasies to the contrary. The suggestion that a person could even become a major party's candidate for President without being 35 years old, born in the United States, and have lived in the United States for more than 14 years, is plainly ridiculous. So too, then, the suggestion that "eligibility" could be a "political issue," since eligibility is easily dispensed with in 5 seconds, as it has been for all candidates.
No, the issue is resolved by realizing that no government entity is empowered to make any constitutional provision an option. This is really asinine, since there isn't even a parallel provision to A1S5C1 in A2 or 12A. If a person doesn't meet the constitutional eligibility requirements for the Presidency, that person is not President under the Constitution, and that's all there is to it.
The few cases we have where an ineligible person gets into office in our nation's history haven't been handled that way. In those rare cases, the person has been impeached, and the acts they did while in office were still valid. Either way, though, the discussion is merely academic. In reality, no one could come within a hundred miles of being President of the United States without being eligible or while hiding their origins. As a person becomes more noteworthy and public, it becomes more difficult to participate in cover-ups, not less.
