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Old March 16th, 2006, 03:56 AM
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sidney sidney is offline
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: New Zealand
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Default Bush to run in 2008?

I saw what at first seemed a bizaare news item, that Senator John McCain urged members of the Southern Republican Leadership Conference at their straw poll for 2008 Republican Presidential candidate to write in votes for George W Bush instead of voting for him.

At first I thought it was part of a McCain strategy to make the best of his certain loss in the straw poll. But I heard a different and more sinister take on this.

George W Bush really does intend to run in 2008! You might think that he can't run for a third term because of the US Constitution, but here is the legal theory that will get him in (once he makes sure that the Supreme Court has enough Justices who will back him up when it is challenged):

First, here's the text of the operative part of the 22nd Amendment:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and 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 the President more than once.

Now, all those left-leaning liberal Democrats who claim that Dubya has been acting as President for the terms to which Gore and then Kerry were actually elected are in a bind: According to their own loudly proclaimed statements about the elections he is still eligible to be elected once!

His supporters, who believe that he was elected, are expected to accept the argument that the first term doesn't count because he did not win a majority of the popular vote. That doesn't quite make sense as avoiding the the second clause ("and no person..."), but is no more tortured an interpretation than other White House legal opinions that they have swallowed recently. And anyway, the final decision will probably be up to the Supreme Court.

So now we know what McCain's straw poll strategy was about: Bush/McCain vs Clinton/Clinton in 2008. (The 22nd Amendment also doesn't preclude a former President from running for VP!)

-- sidney
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