Losing Our Leaders: Are We Prepared?
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson lays seriously ill with the coronavirus in an ICU. President Trump and Vice-President Pence appear regularly together in briefings about COVID19. These twin events raise a troubling question: how prepared are we to respond to an unexpected loss of our leaders?
Such a disaster is not unthinkable. Had the fourth plane on 9/11 reached its target – the Capitol or the White House – the unthinkable could have become reality. A nuclear dirty bomb – or even worse a small nuclear device – could kill from hundreds to hundreds of thousands. What if that happened in the nation’s capitol, while Congress is in session? Or what if the leaders of the House and Senate, as well as the president and vice-president, succumbed to a pandemic?
Article II, Section 1 puts the vice-president first in the line of succession and permits Congress to provide by law for cases where neither a President nor a Vice-President can serve. The 25th amendment, ratified in 1967, prescribes how to fill the vice-presidency if its occupant becomes president (nomination by the new president and confirmation by majority vote of both Houses of Congress). The new president can use the same amendment to fill the office of vice-president. The amendment also addresses how the office of the president will be filled if he or she is physically or mentally incapacitated but still alive, but not if the vice-president is as well. The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 deals with the death of both the president and vice-president. It puts the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate next in line, followed by Cabinet Secretaries, in the order in which their departments were established. There matters have stood, for over seven decades.
The coronavirus pandemic highlight the insufficiency of current succession laws. The existing solution was crafted before the age of terrorism and the march of globalization that makes the spread of contagious disease so easy. Who would guide the Executive Branch if both President Trump and Vice-President Pence were in an ICU on a ventilator? How would the nation react to a President Nancy Pelosi (or a President Mitch McConnell), ushered into office by the deaths of the president and vice-president? How legitimate would we find such a new president if that person was from a different political party than the previously elected president? How much legitimacy would a Cabinet Secretary, an appointee yet elected by no one, have if she or he became president? Neither the Constitution nor current law provides for election of a new president before the end of an elected president’s term. By comparison, for example, the Polish Constitution requires an election within 60 days of the loss of its president. What if someone who assumed the presidency under current law had two or three years or more left in their term?
A pandemic or weapon of mass destruction could well require strong action by a president, as we are seeing in the current COVID19 outbreak. How legitimately and effectively could a new president, unelected by the people, deal with such a crisis if dramatic steps were called for, especially when such measures could be viewed by many as testing the Constitution’s guarantee of civil liberties? Civil disobedience and/or civil unrest are certainly plausible in such a tragedy. The aftermath of 9/11 offers both hopeful and troubling signs – we pulled together to support and grieve with each other, but questions of civil liberties and the use of torture to prevent more attacks still trouble many. How would we fare in the fractured political climate which now characterizes America? Imagine if all this had to be addressed when Congress as well had lost many members, disrupting its own leadership and raising questions about its own capacity and legitimacy to act.
Such scenarios seem fanciful, but their likelihood is real enough. It is essential to craft reasoned responses and move towards a national consensus on how we want ourselves and our government to behave. Legislation and, if necessary, a Constitutional amendment, should be proposed. It’s easier to do this now than in the midst of the next pandemic or terrorist attack.
In the United States, we are a people held together by a piece of parchment. The Constitution is the one unifying force that we rally behind when trouble strikes and look to for guidance on how to respond in a way faithful to who were are. Yet, without more work, if we look to the Constitution when the next unthinkable thing happens, we could well find nothing thoughtful there.
Photo Credit: Joshua Sukoff-unsplash.com
