Why I'm Running for President

I don't want to run for President. I don't want to be President.

Yet, strangely, these are the thoughts that made me decide to run for President. These are the thoughts that have been driving me toward my 2020 run for the past 12 years.

Constitution Series Part 19: Article II, Sections 3 and 4

Starting now, we're going to be breezing through sections and, eventually, whole articles of the Constitution with each post. With much of the framework of the country laid down in Article I and the bulk of the President's processes and powers laid out in Sections 1 and 2, the Constitution will begin handling the rest of its details with impressive brevity.

That's not to say the remaining parts are any less dense than what we've seen already, though. I'm preparing to spend quite a bit of time on two relatively short paragraphs today, after all.

Constitution Series Part 18: Article II, Section 2, Clauses 2 and 3

By far the most common accusation lobbed at any given President is that what they're doing is "unconstitutional." I've tried to offer a multi-faceted view of the Constitution so far, and given certain interpretations of the Constitution many such claims have some substance to their argument. It's often the very definition of debatable due to the interpretive nature of the document.

However, the powers listed in this section are theoretically not debatable. (Well, that's not strictly true, as well see, but anyway) These are the explicit powers of a President granted by the Constitution. There's still some room for interpretation here, but simply put, these powers are literally Constitutional.

Constitution Series Part 17: Article II, Section 2, Clause 1

In Section 1 we established the office of the President and went over how to elect one. But what does a President do? There are two basic schools of thought on this: the first is that a President gets all of the powers implied by an executive office, as established in Section 1. The other is that a President is only allowed to do that which he is explicitly allowed to do as laid out in the Constitution and as granted by Congress.

Historically, Presidents have acted mostly under the former assumption, with implicit powers as an executive. In Section 2, however, we're going to go over the President's explicit powers.

Constitution Series Part 16: Article II, Section 1, Clauses 5 through 8

Today we'll finish Section 1 of Article II, which mostly details the process by which a President is elected. Honestly, the fact that this process has remained more or less unchanged for the past two centuries is pretty incredible. Our Constitution is ridiculously scale-able.

What, Exactly, Qualifies Me to Become President?

Being President of the United States is a fairly important job. Clearly running for that office should require some pretty impressive qualifications.

I don't have those. But I'll be running anyway, and here's why:

The Bright Side of Bush

Today on my Facebook feed I saw a picture that showed George W. Bush and Barack Obama with caption that read, "I'll take Bush on his worst day over Obama on his best day, share if you agree" or something to that effect.

I honestly don't understand what Obama did to deserve so much hatred. I mean, it's thoroughly ingrained in the South that he's ruining America somehow, but you can trace nearly all of those criticisms to baseless fabrications by conservatives trying to smear his reputation. Sometimes blatant racism, too but, honestly, in the South it's a far greater crime to be a liberal than to be black.

In any case, this hatred of an individual and utter refusal to see anything positive in him unsettles me deeply. I shouldn't be surprised by humanity's capacity to dehumanize others, but it never stops bothering me. I never want to believe that another person is truly irredeemable (which is kind of what my faith is all about).

Given that, I'm going to purge this bile by listing some of the positive things George W. Bush accomplished.