Electing, Controlling, and Removing a President

September 25, 2024

This week we reviewed some of the core principles our free society depends on. The “seeds of liberty” include:

• acknowledging that all men are created equal, and our freedoms come from that Creator, not from government
• a just government is based on the consent of the governed;
• the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

We also heard the assurances of the founders that the Constitution being created depends on a moral, therefore religious, public, and the election of honest representatives to carry out the tasks of the government; they assured us that in the absence of those things, the republic being created would not endure.

We explored -

• the use of Oaths of office
• valid and invalid ‘recess appointments’
• the ‘consent of the governed’
• requiring Constitutional authority to be identified for each bill in Congress
• the way the President is elected, with the Electoral College
• the advantages of the Electoral College over the other methods that were considered
• the National Popular vote proposal, in which states would give away their Electoral College votes to the candidate receiving the most votes nationally
• the disadvantages of pure democracy, and the strong feelings of the founders on that subject

We discussed the 25th Amendment, which provides for the removal of the President, either by his own action (which has happened three times in real life), or by the action of the Vice President and the Cabinet. Could the framers have imagined our current situation — an incompetent President who refuses to resign, and a Vice President who will not act to replace him? They could have guessed the result - a dysfunctional, leaderless nation adrift in a dangerous world - but they would be amazed that the people of the nation would allow such a thing to exist!

Next week, October 2, we dive into a study of the judiciary, in particular “The Four Judicial Myths” — things we all believe about the Supreme Court that are simply not true. In so many circumstances we obey “the fiction of the law,” which is not actually what the law says … because we are a law-obeying people. You’ll be surprised.