American presidential election, let PA decide

I've also read that the interpretation of the word "eligibility" would come into play. "Interpretation" gets thrown around a lot in situations like this.

If (and that's a big If) Clinton should select her husband as her running mate it would probably be challenged by the other side. So then what, the Supreme Court? This close to election day?

I'm not even sure Bill would be a plus to her campaign. It's looking like she will have a hard enough time selling one Clinton to the American voters, let alone two.

Frankly I find the constitutional question more interesting than the one about what role Bill Clinton would play in the White House as spouse to a president.  And as far as I know there is no official role for former presidents, the tradition of referring to them as president after their term is a convention of courtesy, not recognition they have a formal standing in the government.

The 12th/22nd amendments question about whether former presidents can become vice presidents is a legitimate concern, and IMHO the interpretation of the 22nd to mean former presidents are ineligible because the intent was to ensure they did not serve more than two terms, ignores precedent.  There is a line of succession that extends beyond the vice president to the speaker of the house, pro-temp of the Senate, Attorney General, and numerous cabinet secretaries.  If we take the narrow view of the 22nd then a former president could not serve in Congress or in a cabinet post, nor as an undersecretary since they can be appointed as acting secretaries and thereby gain standing in the line of succession.  But we've had former presidents serve in some of those roles in the past so we have in fact established precedent that a former president can be eligible to succeed to the presidency, even if they cannot be reelected as president.

Unfortunately law and politics isn't maths and science so the logic of Article 2, the 12th & 22nd amendments and the Presidential Succession Act isn't perfect. The 12th states the VP cannot be someone who is constitutionally ineligible to be president and that does not specifically mention any other role the line of succession (because they are not elected to their roles by public ballot). Therefore a 2-times president is not ineligible to hold any of those governmental roles in the line of succession other than VP - he just cannot become president from those roles so the succession passes to the next in line. You are doing this already with the Secretary of the Interior, who should be 8th in line but is constitutionally ineligible to be president because she was born in London. Of course if the point were reached where looking at the 8th in line to be president was the next step then I doubt there would be much of anything left to govern so picking any surviving ex-President as a figurehead regardless of how many terms he'd served would probably be the wisest choice anyway... I would imagine by then even President 'aisle be bach' Arnie would seem like a good idea.

 

Well, he wasn't:

The only constitution we have is the ability to eat bland, stodgy food without getting constipated... 

The advantage of not having a formal constitution is you can change it without having, or causing, a revolution, which has worked alright up until now. 

That can work in the UK.

But I assure you, it wouldn't work in Latin America.

I always liked the UK system, things work, because they have to work, but here if a i doesn't have a dot on the top, I assure you that a dictator as Fujimori would say it's an l and for that reason a mistake in the text so he may dissolve the congress.

The new Constitution (By Fujimori) says a President can only serve two consecutive periods, and for a re-election he  has to wait a 5 years period.

Fujimori said he was able to serve three consecutive periods, because his first election didn't counted being that the Constitution was proclaimed after he was elected, despite the fact that the text didn't made an exception.

So he was re-elected (Cheating of course) and had to escape from Perú to Japan and resign by fax, because we were at the border of a revolution....In Japan he said he was Japanese and he was allowed to stay, he only was captured when he went to Chile for tourism, and deported to Perú.

So we had a Japanese President despite the fact that the Constitution says only a native born Peruvian can be President.

We need a formal Constitution.