A couple of days ago, I wrote a satirical piece on “What an Obama-Palin Administration Would Have Done For Our Economy.”
Some thought it was somewhat amusing, some didn’t. But no one, including yours truly, thought of or brought up the subject that such an administration was not beyond the realm of possibilities.
It turns out that, before the November 4 elections, commentary was rampant about just such a possibility.
To be sure, an Obama-Palin administration was hardly being bandied about because of its political, ideological, social or whatever kind of attractiveness, but rather because of curiosity about vagaries and vagueness in our Constitution—the 12th Amendment, in particular.
Apparently, if there had been a tie in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives would have had the honor of choosing our next president.
Since Democrats (would have) maintained control of a majority of state delegations in the House (each state is entitled to only one vote each in this case), it would have been a cake walk for Obama.
But, how about the vice president?
Well, the 12th Amendment provides that in the case of an Electoral College tie, the honor of electing the vice president goes to the Senate.
Now, here is where some “stretching” of what turned out to be the political reality comes into play.
If the Democrats maintained a majority in the Senate, as they did, and if they all had voted the Democratic Party line, they would have most likely voted for Sen. Joe Biden. (Unlike the House of Representatives, each senator votes individually.)
If, for some miraculous reason, Republicans had picked up a majority in the Senate, and if all the Republican and Democratic senators had voted the Party line, the Senate most likely would have picked Palin for vice president.
And then there might have been the possibility of a 50-50 tie in the Senate between Biden and Palin. Here’s where it gets confusing. Although the Constitution, on “ordinary” legislation, calls for a vote by the President of the Senate, i.e. the sitting vice president, in the case of a tie, some Constitutional scholars disagree as to whether this rule applies in the case of choosing the Vice President.
Setting this argument aside for now, if in our Biden vs. Palin case there had been a 50-50 tie, Dick Cheney would have had to come out of his undisclosed location to cast his deciding vote—probably for Palin.
And there you would have had an Obama-Palin administration, and how much doggone fun that would have been—you betcha!
Now, before I receive a flood of Constitutional opinions, I did mention earlier about the quirks and vagueness in the 12th Amendment, and about disagreements amongst Constitutional experts.
To address these, I defer to a true Constitutional scholar, Robert Hardaway. Hardaway is a law professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and the author of “Crisis at the Polls” and “The Electoral College and the Constitution.”
In an October 12, 2008, article (“Ready for an Obama/Palin administration?”) in the Chicago Tribune, he wrote:
The 12th Amendment is ambiguous on some points. It does not specify whether, in the case of a tie in the Electoral College, the presidential election should be thrown into the outgoing House, or the one chosen on Election Day. Nor does it say if votes in the state delegations should be by secret or open ballot. It doesn’t even say whether a state’s vote is to be determined by a majority within the delegation or a plurality.
Congress should set rules now for a contingent election of the president in the House and the vice president in the Senate. The worst possible time to consider such rules would be after the election, when judgment on any particular rule would be tainted by which candidate it would favor.
And then there is the other question on whether the tie-breaking vote by the President of the Senate applies to a vice-presidential selection.
Having answered (most of) this Electoral College question, we can now address the real important questions facing America. Questions such as “What would an Obama-Palin Administration have meant to the American turkey population”
(OK, so the title lied…a little bit)
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.