Re: Can a former Prez be appointed Vice Prez???
truesilverwolfman wrote:Can a former President be appointed Vice President after he has served 2 terms as President?
![Question](https://cdn2.able2know.org/images/v5/emoticons/icon_question.gif)
Yes.
The relevant portions of the constitution:
Article 2: No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
12th Amendment: ...no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
22nd Amendment: 1. 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.
The 12th Amendment clarified that the vice-president has the same eligibility requirements for office as the president. Article 2 of the constitution, however, only sets out three requirements for office: (1) natural-born citizen; (2) 35 or older; (3) living in the US for the past 14 years. The 22nd Amendment added an additional requirement: (4) not elected to the office of president twice or not elected to the office of president once after serving more than two years of another president's term.
The 22nd Amendment, therefore, only places a restriction on being elected to the office of president. It doesn't say anything about a person being elected to the office of vice-president. Someone who has been elected twice as president could not be
elected to another term as president, but there's nothing in the 22nd Amendment that says that a two-time president can't fill a part of someone else's presidential term by succeeding that president as a vice-president. In other words, a former president isn't constitutionally ineligible to serve as a vice-president, because he wouldn't be
elected to the office of the president, as set forth in the 22nd Amendment.
Under the 22nd Amendment, therefore, a former president could conceivably serve as a subsequent president's vice-president, and also succeed to the presidency in the event that the president dies or resigns. Whether that vice-president, upon succeeding to the presidency, could serve more than two years as president is unclear. From the text of the 22nd Amendment, it seems that a vice-president, under those circumstances, could not serve more than one
subsequent term as president. If the vice-president is a former president who has already been elected twice, however, it is not clear how that restriction would apply.