Biden May Run For President, Announcing His Vice President Liz Warren Will Take His Place After a Single Term

I talked about this in the last post of the day on Friday but it seems like a big enough thing to be repeated: Biden seems to be soliciting (the rumors go) Liz Warren to agree to serve as his VP, to be announced as his running mate the day of his own announcement. Thus, the presidential candidate and vice presidential candidate would be running as a team since day one of the presidential candidate's entry into the primaries.

Making this more attractive to Liz Warren, who is old as f***, would be Biden's promise of a one-and-done term, making her the heir apparent for the Democrat nomination in 2020.

Not a bad deal. She just may take that deal, and it just may work, at least as far as beating Hillary, who seems to be on the None-and-Done plan.

Jazz Shaw writes of former GOP AG (the last under Bush) Mike Mukasey's argument that Hillary may have legally disqualified herself from ever holding US office again: that's one of the punishments listed in one of the laws she almost certainly broke.

Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.

They specify one corner-case area where "office" does not apply, suggesting it applies every other place you'd think "office" might apply.

But Charles Cooke suggested to me that would be hard to "litigate" in court. In fact, actually, I think it might be too easy to litigate -- and dispose of. The Supreme Court has ruled the qualifications listed in the Constitution (age, natural born citizen) are the exclusive qualifications that may be imposed on a candidate, and may not be added to by a mere act of Congress no more than they can be set aside by an act of Congress. It would take an Amendment to add to, or subtract from, those constitutional qualifications, and thus this law would be ruled, I think, to not apply in the case of La Hillary.*

Which actually you can see the sense of -- otherwise an Obama-type president, with a Holder-type AG, might attempt to make mischief by making up and prosecuting the opposing party's best candidates for laws which claim to "disqualify" people from US office, should such laws be claimed to have been violated.

Alas.

* Specifically, laws establishing term limits on US officeholders were struck down by the courts, on the theory that such laws add an additional qualification (that the candidate should not have served x or more previous terms) to the list of qualifications in the Constitution itself.

posted by Ace at 03:41 PM

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