My prediction that Herman Cain, should he become the Republican nominee for President, will ask Newt Gingrich to join him on the ticket, led the ever-vigilant Rob Eno to respond via Twitter:
@bluemassgroup good article on cain gingrich debate. One problem, they are both residents of georgia and const won’t let em run together
This is a helpful factual observation by Rob – I had not realized that Cain was a Georgia resident. However, his legal conclusion is wrong. To correct a popular misconception: there is no constitutional bar to the president and vice president hailing from the same state. It would certainly be unusual, and perhaps unprecedented (especially if you buy that Dick Cheney was a legal resident of Wyoming in 2000), but it could happen.
The source of the confusion is the 12th Amendment, which reads in relevant part:
The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves….
Immediately, we see what the actual effect of, say, a Republican one-state candidacy would be: the Republican electors from the state in question would not be able to cast their votes for the party’s candidates for both president and vice-president. So, in a hypothetical Cain/Gingrich candidacy in which Georgia went Republican, the Georgia electors would presumably vote for Cain for president, and then they’d have to vote for someone other than Gingrich – perhaps the chairman of the Republican National Committee (assuming he doesn’t live in Georgia) – for vice president.
The practical difficulty would be that if the election were close enough that Georgia’s electoral votes were necessary to decide the result, the selection of the Vice President could be thrown into the Senate, because according to the 12th Amendment, “if no person have a majority [of electoral votes], then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice.” So there is certainly some risk in going the one-state route. But there’s no constitutional bar to doing it.
I’m pretty sure TX did in fact cast all of its electoral votes for both Bush and Cheney in 2000 with no legal issues arising.
There was a legal challenge to Cheney’s change-of-address early on, but the courts rejected it.
…according to the website of the NH Secretary of State, Gingrich currently lists his residence as McLean, VA.