Take Two

[guru]

Obama retakes the Oath.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28780417/

If Rehnquist could get it right in '05 while sitting on death's door and with a trachiotomy tube in his throat Roberts has no excuse. It's 35 words for crying out loud.

Next time bring notes Mr. Chief Justice.

[gh]

gee, now I know why law dudes are so important :roll:

[Cooter Brown]

Law states only that the Presidency starts at noon on 1/20. No ceremonies, oaths, etc. are required.

Pretty sure they just did this to ward off the black helicopter & radio host crowd from starting another rant on why he's not legally eligible to be Prez.

[guru]

Law states only that the Presidency starts at noon on 1/20. No ceremonies, oaths, etc. are required.

I would tend to agree with you, and the 20th Amendment does state the TERM begins at Noon on 1/20. However, the Oath is called for by the Constitution(Article 2) before the President can actually begin executing his duties.

I'm not so sure the 20th Amendment would be interpreted as rendering the Oath as meaningless by a constitutional scholar, especially since it does not directly address the Oath. And of course there's the matter of why a VP assuming the presidency would have to take an Oath that was not legally mandated for his predecessor.

But of course it's a moot point anyway.

[Marlow]

But of course it's a moot point anyway.

Mooter, to me, is the hand on the Bible part. I assume that that is NOT part of any law or article.

[Law dude]

guru is correct. The exact words of the Constitution are:

Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation:--"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

(The third word of that sentence looks to me like a typo. I would think it should be "enters." But it appears as "enter" in the first three versions I found on the web and I don't have the time to dig deeper and figure out what accounts for that discrepancy.")

The reason for take two was certainly that stated in the article linked in the first post of this thread.

Obama and Roberts went through the drill again out of what White House counsel Greg Craig called "an abundance of caution."

Some people might say that was an overabundance of caution, but I wouldn't second guess the decision. I cannot imagine a court ruling that what happened at the inauguration in any way affected the legitimacy of Obama's presidency or his authority to do whatever he is otherwise authorized to do, Nonetheless, take two didn't cost anything, did no harm, and eliminated the possibility of a subsequent waste of valuable law dudes' time dealing with a frivolous challenge to the validity of acts that he has performed as President.

[Law dude]

But of course it's a moot point anyway.

Mooter, to me, is the hand on the Bible part. I assume that that is NOT part of any law or article.

Not that I can think of.

[guru]

But of course it's a moot point anyway.

Mooter, to me, is the hand on the Bible part. I assume that that is NOT part of any law or article.

It's not law, but one would assume a person of religious faith would simply see it as a way of affirming his/her sincerity.

[Marlow]

It's not law, but one would assume a person of religious faith would simply see it as a way of affirming his/her sincerity.

The oath is a vestige of a medieval sense of fealty to a liege. I'm not into traditions that serve no purpose. How people have have taken oaths on Bibles and then lied and/or betrayed the trust placed in them? It means nothing. The trouble they get into if they betray us has nothing to do with the breaking of their 'oath'.

[JRM]

But of course it's a moot point anyway.

Mooter, to me, is the hand on the Bible part. I assume that that is NOT part of any law or article.

It's not law, but one would assume a person of religious faith would simply see it as a way of affirming his/her sincerity.

This is an issue that can be construed to teeter on the separation of church and state. The Bible is not actually required for the ceremony. John Quincy Adams actually used a law book for his Oath of Office, based on that premise.

For a list of other flubs, see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_of ... Oath_flubs

There have been at least 3 retakes, in addition to Monday's.

[bijanc]

Obama Oath Do-Over

I like the oath Stevens administered to Biden.

[BruceFlorman]

There's an amusing Op-Ed piece in the NYT about this, and I'm confident that Marlow will have an opinion about it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/opini ... er.html?em

...

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”

...

In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb.

...

[Marlow]

I'm confident that Marlow will have an opinion about it.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence.

No duh!
As I've mentioned before, I teach my students ALL the rules and then give them carte blanche to break any of them if they wish, as long as they do it consciously and with a rhetorical intent. Language Luddites don't get that language is a living entity; it evolves. It molts and sheds skins frequently. Split infinitives, contractions, ending sentences with prepositions, beginning sentences with 'and' (which the King James Bible does frequently!), etc., are fully acceptable in my Usage Guidelines. So are sentence fragments. (:twisted
The use of who/whom and the subjunctive mood are next on the Extinction List. I still use them, but my great-grandkids probably won't, and no one will miss them. They have lost their functionality.
I am all about good clear, effective communication, but that can be achieved without a slavish following of traditional grammar 'rules'.

Don't even get me started on comma usage!

[gh]

I, shan't.

[jhc68]

Marlow is right. All this oath stuff is a bogus, mumbo-jumbo, phony mysticism sort of issue.

The only people concerned about it are the same nut cases who claimed Obama was ineligible for election because they didn't happen to like the looks of the version of his birth certificate that was posted online. There was never any doubt that his mother was an American citizen at the time of his birth and that alone would have qualified Obama as a natural-born citizen.

Likewise, from any practical viewpoint, it seems obvious that the person formally designated President by the Electoral College or by the Presidential Succession Act's line of succession becomes President when the office becomes vacant immediately, even with no oath adminstered at all. When JFK was murdered, LBJ automatically became President even before the oath was administered aboard Air Force 1.