Was Condi the first African-American President of the United States for One Minute?

The title of this post sounds pretty preposterous but it actually was worked out by constitutional scholars according to the timeline of the inauguration on Tuesday.  Although this will probably never make it into the history books because of the very obvious technicalities involved, I still thought that it was really interesting.

The jist:  The outgoing President and Vice-President were no longer in office as 12pm on Tuesday, January 20, 2009.

That means that the next in line is the Speaker of the House and then the president pro-tem of the Senate, in that order.  However, the Speaker and the President Pro-Tem are not President until they resign their offices.

Neither of them did, therefore the succession goes down to the Secretary of State, who does not have to resign their office to become President.  So from the time that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were no  longer in office, 12pm, and the time that Joe Biden completed his oath of office, 12:01pm, the President of the United States was Condoleeza Rice, making her the first African-American President of the United States.  Heck, she was also the first woman President of the United States at that.

(Edit: Depending on the timeline of W’s inauguration, by the same reasoning, Madeline Albright may have briefly been the first woman President of the USA.)

So Joe Biden was the President from 12:01 to 12:03pm, when Barack Obama became President at the completion of his Oath.

Pretty Interesting Stuff!

Read the newspaper article here:

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2009/01/20/remember-when-biden-was-president/

PS:  Thanks to Leo LaPorte for pointing me to this article and topic in his blog at
http://leoville.com/2009/01/21/21842/