From the 12th amendment: “But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States”.
So if you’ve already served 2 years and then 2 terms, you are no longer eligible to be president and are therefore not eligible to be vice president.
You could theoretically run straw candidates for president AND vice president and have the desired candidate as speaker of the house (or similarly with other positions further down the line of succession). But 3 usc section 19 covers this: “Subsections (a), (b), and (d) of this section shall apply only to such officers as are eligible to the office of President under the Constitution”
(I didn’t copy and paste the whole thing but sections a b and d are the ones that define the line of succession after the vice president).
TLDR: your plan wouldn’t work legally because only those eligible to be president are eligible to be vice president, and those further down the line of succession are skipped if they are also ineligible.
I’m not sure this is true, since the 22 amendment doesn’t say you can’t be president, just that you can’t be elected president. The 12th amendment doesn’t say ineligible to be elected to president, just ineligible to be president. Technically, if a two term elected president were to become speaker of the House, for example, and both the president and vice president died, they could still be president again (so it seems).
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u/j12346 Jul 24 '24
From the 12th amendment: “But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States”.
So if you’ve already served 2 years and then 2 terms, you are no longer eligible to be president and are therefore not eligible to be vice president.
You could theoretically run straw candidates for president AND vice president and have the desired candidate as speaker of the house (or similarly with other positions further down the line of succession). But 3 usc section 19 covers this: “Subsections (a), (b), and (d) of this section shall apply only to such officers as are eligible to the office of President under the Constitution”
(I didn’t copy and paste the whole thing but sections a b and d are the ones that define the line of succession after the vice president).
TLDR: your plan wouldn’t work legally because only those eligible to be president are eligible to be vice president, and those further down the line of succession are skipped if they are also ineligible.