Deep Perdue-doo

North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue made the news this week with her proposal that elections be suspended in 2012. What’s going on here? One attorney has has deduced an esoteric rationale supporting Perdue’s proposal:

I think I may have figured out what North Carolina Governor Perdue was (implicitly) getting at by her “joking” . . . uh, no, “hyperbolic” . . . uh, no, “sarcastic” comment that maybe the 2012 elections should be “suspended,” to allow Washington to deal with the country’s problems, free from the vicissitudes of electoral politics.

Consider, if no elections were held in November 2012, come noon on January 20, 2013:

1. Barack Obama would cease being President per operation of Amendment XX;

2. Joe Biden would likewise cease being Vice President per Amendment XX;

3. In that circumstance, per Amendment XX and 3 U.S.C. § 19, Speaker of the House John Boehner “shall . . . act as President,” except, there having been no elections (under this presumed scenario), Boehner would as of January 3, 2013 (again, per operation of Amendment XX), no longer be a member of the House of Representatives, much less the Speaker of the House.

4. In that circumstances, per Amendment XX and 3 U.S.C. § 19, the task of acting as President would devolve to the President Pro Tempore of the U.S. Senate, who is currently Dan Inouye of Hawaii, except, that Senator Inouye was born in Hawaii in 1924, before Hawaii was a state of the United States. This presumably makes Senator Inouye “ineligible to” the office of President within the meaning of Article II, Section 1, Clause 5.

5. In that circumstance, per 3 U.S.C. § 19(d)(1), the task of acting “as President” would devolve next to the Secretary of State, who is currently:

Hillary Clinton.

In short, Governor Perdue is obviously a Hillary supporter, and was making a veiled invitation for Secretary Clinton to seize the reins of the Presidency from Barack Obama.

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