[FONT="]Putting everything else aside, how profoundly stupid do you have to be to believe that the founders intended for the vice president to be able to select the next president regardless of official election results? Why is former Vice President John Nance Garner’s verdict that the job isn’t worth a “bucket of warm spit” (or in some versions, a more noxious form of bodily effluvia) the only thing for which anyone remembers Garner?[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#333333][FONT="]According to this theory, then-Vice President Dick Cheney could have rejected Barack Obama’s electors and installed John McCain as president in early 2009. Heck, Al Gore, who was vice president in 2000, could have rejected George W. Bush’s Florida electoral votes and named himself president. According to Gohmert & Co. this would have been perfectly legal and constitutional.[/FONT]
[FONT="]I should note that if you take this idea seriously, not only would the vice president be massively more powerful than anybody ever thought, but the very idea of federal elections and federalism itself would be rendered null and void. A single highly partisan politician could simply override the will of the states, and the electorate generally, and pick the winner. Why not just have the debates in the vice president’s living room from now on?
Jonah Goldberg[/FONT]