At 78, he is older even than the older president to leave office, Ronald Reagan, who was still 77 for a few days at the end of his second term. That is almost two years older than the current life expectancy for a US-born male, which is A seamless transition of power in case of unexpected events is a hallmark of a functioning democracy.
Biden signed more executive actions on day one than Trump, Obama, and Bush combined. In , Zachary Taylor president 12 , died at 66, possibly of cholera, potentially caused by eating too much dry fruit at a celebration.
In , Abraham Lincoln president 16 , then 56, was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a confederacy supporter. William McKinley president 25 died at 58 in , also assassinated, by anarchist Leon Czolgosz.
Warren Harding president 29 died at 57 in of a heart attack and was not, as it was rumored at the time, poisoned by his wife Florence, to whom he was unfaithful.
In , John F. At 46, he was the youngest president at the end of his office. The vice-president in this case, Kamala Harris is sworn in to take over the presidential responsibilities until the end of the mandate. Similarly, if the president is temporarily unable to serve, they have to communicate it in writing to the president pro tempore of the Senate who presides over the Senate in lieu of the vice-president and the Speaker of the House.
The vice-president then takes on presidential responsibility until the president lets the Senate and House know they can resume their duties. This has happened three times in US history: For about eight hours in , then vice-president George H W Bush acted as president while Ronald Reagan underwent colon cancer surgery. In and , for two hours each time, vice-president Dick Cheney acted as president while George W Bush underwent two colonoscopies under anesthesia.
If the vice-presidential seat is vacated, the president can nominate a successor, who then has to be confirmed by a simple majority vote in both houses of Congress. In recent decades, this has mainly been a formality. But Congress does have the power to consider and rule on objections to the counting of certain electoral votes.
If there is an objection from any member of Congress, the House and Senate will each decide what to do with the objection. If just one chamber votes to sustain the objection, that means the objection fails. As mentioned above, the only precedent we have is ominous. When three electors tried to vote for the late Horace Greeley in early , Congress disqualified their votes, on the understandable grounds that Greeley was dead.
But that was before the 20th Amendment existed. Ratified in , this amendment makes clear that the vice president-elect becomes president if the president-elect has died by Inauguration Day.
Is it after the voters themselves vote on Election Day? Is it after the Electoral College votes are cast in mid-December? Or is it after Congress counts the Electoral College votes in early January? According to Thomas Neale of the Congressional Research Service , the amendment likely kicks in once the Electoral College votes are cast. Here, again, as at all stages in the process, the solution to a dead president-elect seems obvious — turn to the vice president-elect — but this has never been tested in practice.
And again, there is the potential for mischief in a close contest, especially if both chambers of the new Congress are controlled by a different party than the deceased winning candidate. President Trump has clearly been laying the groundwork to try to contest the results of a close election, with baseless claims of fraud in mail voting and declining to promise a peaceful transfer of power.
Barton Gellman of the Atlantic has also reported on potential shenanigans from Republican-controlled legislatures in swing states, which could involve disregarding the vote totals in their state to appoint partisan electors, based on claims of fraud. Some of those states have Democratic governors, who could then refuse to certify the vote totals. Congress might have to step in, and the courts could get involved as well.
But if the race tightens and the outcome is contested — and then a candidate death is thrown into the mix — things could get explosive. Most recently he worried fans when he nearly took a tumble as he was boarding Air Force One. So while we aren't keen on playing the "what if" game, particularly if it involves the death of a president, there is something of a need to talk about what happens in the event that Joe Biden dies in office — which is something we had to do when former President Donald Trump came down with COVID before the November elections in via The Intelligencer.
First of all, it might make you feel better to know that the country has laws that guarantee the continuity of government, which keeps a vacancy from coming up in the event that the president dies while in office.
The Presidential Succession Act has gone through some changes from when the act was first created in , and amended in , and then again in The changes had to do with the positions of both the Senate president pro tempore and the speaker of the House within the line of succession via the U.
So in the event that President Joe Biden were to die in office, the Succession Act dictates that he would be succeeded by Vice President Kamala Harris , followed by the speaker of the House — who at this time is Nancy Pelosi. Garfield that left him incapacitated before he died, and Woodrow Wilson's October stroke, which debilitated him severely, per law professor John D.
Led by Sen. Birch Bayh, Congress submitted the 25th Amendment to the Constitution in as an effort to clarify the questions surrounding presidential succession. The amendment was adopted in when Nevada became the 38th state to ratify it — the minimum number of states required, though nine other states followed suit in the following months, as stated on the U. Constitution website. The first section of the 25th Amendment established that the vice president would indeed become president following the resignation, removal, or death of a sitting president, as The New York Times explained.
The second section determined that the position of the vice president would be filled by a presidential appointment, pending Congress approval. This clarification became useful in , when President Richard Nixon resigned during the Watergate scandal. The amendment also allows the vice president to step in as acting president in case the latter becomes temporarily unable to serve. Finally, the 25th Amendment gives the vice president and the cabinet power to remove the president if they believe he or she is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.
The 25th Amendment leaves no room for doubt that Vice President Kamala Harris would replace Joe Biden as president if he died while in office. But would she be able to run for president later on if she were to step in for Biden? In fact, she could end up as a candidate in and , but that would depend on when the president died. If Biden became unable to serve within his first two years in office, Harris could run for one additional term as president, per the The North State Journal.
If he died within the last two years, his vice president could then run in two elections, meaning Harris could end up being president for more than eight years if Biden died either in or — and if she were successful, of course.
That is because the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in under Harry S. Truman, established that no president could hold office for more than two terms, per the National Constitution Center , which wasn't laid out in the Constitution. The amendment also clarified that "no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of President more than once.
Joe Biden has suffered a series of health setbacks Shutterstock.
0コメント