July 23, 2024: Secret Service Director Resigns, Constitutional Arguments Behind Obama's VP Eligibility, DOT Investigating Delta, and Biden to Address the Nation.
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Welcome back to Unbiased, your favorite source of unbiased news and legal analysis.

Welcome back to Unbiased. Today is Tuesday, July 23rd, and sadly, this is your last daily news rundown until August 5th, or so I've planned at least. You never know what can happen. If something crazy happens, I may pop back on and do a special report, but as I have been reminding you, I will still be posting to social media while I'm away. So this is it for podcast episodes until August 5th, a week from Monday, but make sure you're following me on Instagram and TikTok to stay up to date until then.

My usernames on both platforms is JordanIsMyLawyer. You can also find links to each of those platforms in this episode description. As a reminder, if you love the unbiased approach that this episode provides, you feel more informed after listening, please go ahead and leave my show a review on whatever platform you listen. It really helps me out. You can also share this show with your friends. And if you're watching on YouTube, please go ahead and hit that thumbs up button and

and subscribe to the channel if you're not already. Thank you very much in advance. As you may be able to tell, today's episode is out a little earlier than usual, so just note that my news cycle today ended around 1 p.m. Eastern time. And now, without further ado, we can get into today's stories, starting off with a couple of clarifications to yesterday's episode.

In yesterday's episode, I did a 17-minute Q&A answering a lot of your questions about President Biden dropping out of the race and what the implications of that are. One of the questions was about Obama's eligibility for vice president. And we don't even know if he's going to be the vice president pick, but it was a question and I answered it. And I said that nothing in the Constitution explicitly prevents him from being VP, but

I should have gone a little bit more into detail because while that answer is technically correct, there is an argument on the other side that's worth talking about. The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1951. And what it did is it created a two-term limit for

So it says, quote,

In other words, you can't serve more than two terms as president. And if you took office because the elected president left office, let's assume you were the VP, if you take over and you serve at least two of those four years, you can only be elected once after that.

The 22nd Amendment, though, says nothing about vice presidents. So under the 22nd Amendment alone, vice presidents are not limited to that same two-year cap. And consequently, a president could technically serve in another office, such as vice president, after serving two terms. The 22nd Amendment, again, does not explicitly prohibit it.

But now let's talk about the 12th Amendment. So the 12th Amendment was enacted in 1804, way before the 22nd Amendment. And what the 12th Amendment says in part and at the very end is, quote, but no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice president in the United States, end quote. Now, I want you to think about where the United States was in 1804 when that provision was written. Absolutely.

At that time, the eligibility requirements for president were, and still are, set forth in Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution. And it's those three requirements we have talked about time and time again. At least 35 years of age at the time of inauguration, has lived in the United States for at least 14 years at the time of inauguration, and is a natural-born citizen.

So when the 12th Amendment was ratified in 1804, what Congress and the states meant to imply is that a person cannot be vice president if they don't meet those three constitutional requirements for the presidency. You can't be VP if you're younger than 35, haven't lived in the U.S. for 14 years, and aren't a natural born citizen. That was the intent at

the time. So what happens when you fast forward roughly 150 years and now Congress and the states say that you're also ineligible to be president if you've served two terms? Does this automatically become an eligibility requirement under the 12th Amendment or is the 12th Amendment limited to the eligibility requirements in place at the time of ratification in 1804? It's complicated. It's

If the issue presented itself, this would likely be a question for the Supreme Court, who, as we know, has the role of interpreting the Constitution. I can see the arguments on both sides, as I always can. So while my answer yesterday was technically correct, that nothing in the Constitution explicitly prohibits a former two-term president from now serving as VP, there is certainly an argument to be had on the other side due to the text of the 12th Amendment.

So that's that update. The second and final update I wanted to give as it pertains to yesterday's episode is that Vice President Harris now has enough delegate votes to win the nomination. Yesterday, we spoke about the fact that a candidate just needs a simple majority of the Democratic delegate votes.

at least 1,975 votes to win the Democratic nomination. And she does have at least that as of last night. So the Democratic Party can either continue on with their virtual roll call as they were planning to do when Biden was the presumptive nominee.

and lock in Harris as the presidential nominee as early as late next week. That way they avoid any potential state ballot issues, as we discussed yesterday. Otherwise, if they don't proceed with the virtual roll call, Harris will presumably become the Democratic presidential nominee at the convention at the end of August. So that's what we can expect from here. And with those updates out of the way, let's move on to the next topic.

story. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheadle has officially resigned from her position. Her resignation comes just one day after she testified before the House Oversight Committee about the assassination attempt on former President Trump and follows calls from many lawmakers for her to do so. The purpose of yesterday's congressional hearing was to get answers as to what went wrong on July 13th, who was responsible, and how we can prevent something like that from happening in the future.

And unlike a lot of these congressional hearings we see, Cheadle was questioned hard by both Democrats and Republicans. In her opening statement, she called the shooting, quote, "...the most significant operational failure at the Secret Service in decades."

But then once she was questioned by lawmakers, she was unable to answer very critical questions like why there was no agent on the roof that the gunman was able to climb onto. Instead, she referenced the ongoing investigation. She said she didn't want to provide any information that wasn't factual at this time. She deferred a lot to the FBI.

Cheadle did say that the building was outside the security perimeter on the day of the visit to the site, but that that is also one of the things the FBI is looking into during the course of the investigation. She said that on the day of the rally, the shooter was identified as suspicious but not a threat.

And there's a difference when it comes to the actions that are taken depending on how a person is identified. So if the shooter had been identified as a threat rather than just suspicious, then according to Cheadle, Trump wouldn't have been allowed or brought onto the stage. We also found out through Cheadle's testimony that Secret Service was notified of Crook's presence outside the rally area two to five times before the shooting took place.

So this hearing lasted four hours. Obviously, I'm not going to cover everything that was said, although I, of course, do have a link to the full hearing in the sources section of this episode if you're interested in listening to it. What I will say, though, is the general feeling of the hearing was frustration. Lawmakers were very frustrated because they didn't get a lot of answers at

As I said, Sheetal would often go back to the fact that this is an open investigation. She couldn't talk about specifics. And a lot of the time she would defer to the FBI. As an example, at one point, one of the representatives asked her how many shell casings were found on the roof where the shooter was positioned.

and Cheadle deferred to the FBI. The lawmaker then asked Cheadle if she's been told by the FBI how many shell casings were found on the roof. Cheadle said yes. So the lawmaker said, okay, so then tell us how many shell casings were found on the roof. And Cheadle again deferred to the FBI and would not answer the question.

So there was a lot of that happening, a lot of unanswered questions, despite Cheadle having previously said that she takes full accountability and that the quote unquote buck stops with her. In fact, at one point, one representative noted that the American people got more answers from watching the shooting live on television than they got at yesterday's congressional hearing. So just overall frustration from the lawmakers, which led to Representative Nancy Mace's

filing a privileged resolution to impeach Cheadle following the hearing and also a bipartisan letter demanding Cheadle's resignation. That letter was written by the committee chairman, Comer, but then joined by Democratic Representative Raskin, making it a bipartisan letter.

Cheadle had previously said she wouldn't be resigning from her position, and actually even at the hearing yesterday, she said that she would not be resigning because she felt that she was the best person for the job. But it seems after hours, she had a change of heart and today announced her resignation in a letter to Secret Service staff.

It reads in part, quote,

As your director, I take full responsibility for the security lapse, end quote. From here, now that she has resigned, President Biden will appoint a new Secret Service director, which is not subject to Senate confirmation like some presidential appointments are. Some appointments just aren't subject to that Senate confirmation, and Secret Service director is one of them.

Moving on to quick hitters and starting with one that is related to that story we just talked about. Speaker Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have teamed up and announced a bipartisan task force to investigate the attempted assassination. Johnson says the task force will have subpoena power and will focus on understanding the security failures that led to the shooting, seek accountability and prevent an attempt from happening in the future.

The task force will consist of 13 members, seven of which are Republicans, six are Democrats. In some other news, Vice President Harris held her first campaign rally today in Milwaukee, and she previewed some themes that she will highlight throughout her campaign against Trump, which include economic opportunity, abortion access, full freedoms, and equal rights.

And relatedly, Harris's campaign raised more than $81 million in the 24 hours after President Biden announced he would not be seeking re-election. By the end of the 48-hour period, she had raised more than $100 million. And these donations consist of money donated straight to Harris's campaign, as well as the Democratic National Committee and joint fundraising committees like ActBlue.

The Department of Transportation has opened an investigation into Delta Airlines over recent flight disruptions following the CrowdStrike outage. As we know, and as we talked about yesterday, a CrowdStrike update on Friday caused a global outage

on Windows systems, but it's now Tuesday and Delta can't seem to get it together considering it canceled 400 more flights today. The airline with the second most cancellations today only canceled 55. So authorities are wondering why Delta specifically is having such a tough time bouncing back. Therefore, the investigation has been opened.

And finally, President Biden will address the nation tomorrow night, that is Wednesday night, at 8 p.m. Eastern time to talk about his decision to step down, what lies ahead, and how he plans to, quote, finish the job for the American people, end quote.

That is what I have for you today. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you have a great next week and a half while I'm away. For my sake, I'm hoping the news slows down a little bit just because I would like to enjoy my vacation. But just know that I will miss you just as much as you miss me and I will be back.

on August 5th. But follow me on social media in the meantime, so we don't miss each other too much. At Jordan is my lawyer is my username on all of those platforms. And I will talk to you soon.