Leave it to the new New Republic‘s Brian Beutler to come up with the nuttiest idea yet. The Democrats must really be nervous about the impending implosion of Lady Macbeth’s “campaign” —
A Modest Proposal: Barack Obama Should Be Hillary Clinton’s Running Mate
The challenge, then, is to make sure Clinton’s age and ethnicity don’t discourage Obama’s youthful, diverse supporters from turning out in November 2016. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to make sure that doesn’t happen. Clinton simply has to select Barack Obama as her running mate.
LOL, you might be thinking. Obama can’t be the vice president. That would place him at the top of the line of succession, and the Constitution limits him to two terms. Clinton would end up in court before she ended up in the White House if she pulled something like that.
I’ll grant that if Democrats nominate Barack Obama to be their vice presidential candidate next year, it would be somewhat controversial. But here Democrats can borrow tactically from the literal-minded conservatives who have seized on syntactic oddities to unravel Obama’s domestic agenda. As a purely textual matter, the Constitution merely prohibits Obama from being elected to a third term. It doesn’t necessarily prohibit him from actually being president again, should Hillary Clinton no longer be able to serve. And were he on the ticket, Clinton’s potential liabilities with Obama loyalists would disappear.
Beutler goes on to explain that, if you parse the Constitution carefully enough, there’s no absolute proscription on a two-term president, elected as veep, inheriting the Oval Office once again upon the demise of you know who.
The 22nd Amendment begins “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Whether its adopters intended it or not, the plain language of the 22nd amendment doesn’t prohibit a former two-term president from succeeding a sitting president and serving out the remainder of her term. It merely prohibits him from running for a third. By using the term “elected” instead of “eligible” its authors created a loophole large enough for a Clinton-Obama ticket to coast to victory through…
I gather Republicans wouldn’t be terribly happy about all this. The Supreme Court’s five conservative justices might even disallow it. But they’d have to abandon their textualist predilections to do so. Reince Priebus v. Barack Obama would become the Bush v. Gore of our time, except in this instance, the Court wouldn’t be able to frustrate the will of the voters outright.
It all depends on what the meaning of “frustrate” is.
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