President Joe Biden

No, I'm not declaring that Joe Biden is the current President, but I do believe he was the President for a few minutes on January 20th. I'm going to completely avoid commenting on the oath flubbing, but on a related note, I sure hope Chief Justice Roberts isn't a textualist.

The 20th Amendment provides that "the terms of the President and Vice-President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January...and the terms of their successors shall then begin." (Italics mine).

This leads to the simple conclusion that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney no longer held their offices at that point. However, Art. II, Sec. 1, Cl. 8 provides that "before he enter on the execution of his office, [the President] shall take the following oath..."

This creates a minor problem because Obama did not take the oath prior to noon. According to many different sources and my own recollection, it was about 12:03pm when he took the oath. Therefore, Obama was not eligible to assume the office of the Presidency at noon because he did not meet the express condition of taking the oath before his term began.

This takes us to Art. II, Sec. 1, Cl. 5 which grants succession power to the Vice-President. It states in part, "In case of inability to ... discharge the Powers and Duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice-President..."

Accordingly, with (now) President Obama unable to assume those powers by failing to take the oath prior to noon, Vice-President Joe Biden assumed the powers of the Presidency for about a period of three minutes.

Disclaimer: I'm merely a second year law student in the second semester of constitutional law. Perhaps - maybe even probably - my analysis is entirely off-base. But for the record, I think it looks pretty good. And yes, this is without a doubt the most dorky post I have ever written on this blog.