Political Party and Senatorial Succession: A Response to Vikram Amar on How Best to Interpret the Seventeenth Amendment

Authors

Sanford Levinson

Abstract

This Article explores the author's fundamental disagreement with Vikram Amar's argument as to the meaning of the Seventeenth Amendment. Amar's argument is "a brilliant explication of various trees that misses the reality of the surrounding forest." The author contrasts my response to this article to another article that several years ago definitively demonstrated the unconstitutionality of the current Succession in Office Act (the Act) inasmuch as it makes the Speaker of the House (and then the president pro tempore of the Senate) next in line to the vice president to fill any vacancies in the Oval Office. Both that article and the one under discussion here are alike in making skillful use of the methods, including the particular fillip identified as "intratextuality." Yet the first article was absolutely convincing, while the one examined here leaves the author "decidedly skeptical."

Recommended Citation

Sanford Levinson, Political Party and Senatorial Succession: A Response to Vikram Amar on How Best to Interpret the Seventeenth Amendment, 35 Hastings Const. L.Q. 713 (2008).
Available at: https://repository.uclawsf.edu/hastings_constitutional_law_quaterly/vol35/iss4/4