Presidential Succession

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SHERMAN. I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his dedication to the importance of assuring the continuity of our government.

We here in Washington have erected these concrete barriers, blocking this road, blocking Pennsylvania Avenue, all to assure the survival of our physical embodiment of our government. We must make sure that we have done just as much to protect the identity of those who will make the decisions. Our laws should be as strong as our concrete barriers. In the post-September 11 world, that which was just thought to be a distant possibility must now be something that we plan for. The line of Presidential succession determines who becomes President after the President and the Vice President if they are both permanently or temporarily unable to carry out their duties.

We can change this without amending the Constitution. It is the 1947 Presidential Succession Act which currently governs. In fact, going back to the statute that existed before 1947 would be a substantial step in the right direction and would deal with many of the problems that I will identify here tonight. Not only is this an issue that we can solve without amending our Constitution, it is one that is critically important to solve for two reasons.

First, as important as Congress is, and I am proud to serve in this body, in the days following a catastrophic attack, knowing the identity of the Commander in Chief will be perhaps the most important legal issue to deal with that crisis. And, second, while it would take a nuclear bomb, perhaps, to destroy a majority of the Members of the House or the Members of the Senate, it does not take anywhere near such a catastrophe to have the President and the Vice President not able to serve. In fact, John Wilkes Booth came within an inch of doing it in 1865, and he did not have any nuclear weapons. Yes, he killed President Lincoln. He also tried to kill the Secretary of State and the Vice President of the United States. Those other assassination attempts failed. So muskets or hand revolvers have been sufficient to bring us close to a position where we would move through the line of succession.

What is that line of succession now? Right after the Vice President is the Speaker of this House. That creates a few problems, illustrated in a "West Wing" scenario. It was as if "West Wing" had focused on the bill that I introduced to this Congress very early in 2001. In that scenario, you had no Vice President serving, the Speaker of the House was of another political party, and the President was only temporarily incapacitated. What happened on television was not quite believable to those of us who live in the politically charged atmosphere here in Washington. The President temporarily gave up the Presidency to a person of another political party, voluntarily and under a circumstance where he would have legitimately continued to retain the Presidency, but he thought that the kidnapping of his daughter in this scenario made him too preoccupied to serve. What about the real Washington? Would a President whose family circumstance makes it difficult or impossible to continue to serve temporarily give up the White House to somebody of the opposite philosophy? One can only imagine the aides coming and saying, Mr. President, don't do it. There will be 500 pieces of legislation signed into law within the first hour of your incapacity.

In addition, under this scenario, the Speaker agreed to assume the presidency, had to resign his seat in the Congress, served as President for only a day or two, and then left public service. Would every Speaker of this House be willing to resign their seat in Congress for an hour or two or a day or two in the White House? And if not, what does that do to our system?

The answer is that we must maintain a system in which the philosophy that governs in the White House is the same throughout a 4-year term in office. This is important for a number of reasons. First, let us say the office of Vice President was vacant. Our friends wonder whether a heart attack or an assassination could suddenly change the direction of America. The stock markets wonder whether all economic policy could change with one ill-fated bad effect on one man or woman's health. Not a good situation. We should have continuity of philosophy in the White House throughout the 4-year term.

Not only that, it encourages assassins. Imagine either a group of fanatics or an individual lunatic believing they could justify their act because they were not just killing an individual man or woman, they were radically changing the philosophy that governed here in Washington.

Who is fourth in line? Fourth in line is the President pro tempore of the Senate. Yes, that means Mr. Strom Thurmond. An individual who served this country quite long as a United States Senator in his 98th year was third in line to serve as President of the United States. Could al Qaeda come up with a better plan than the death of three individuals vesting the presidency in a man who at that time had seen better days? I think that in a world of suicide assassins, we are negligent in our duties if we do not revisit the 1947 Presidential Succession Act.

There will be those who say we have muddled along so far without having to worry about this. Clearly, the events of 9/11 illustrate that we have to protect ourselves not just from what has happened but from that which might happen.

There are a number of possible solutions. I put before this House, in I believe it was February of 2001, a bill which I reintroduced in the current Congress that would provide two things: First, it would deal with one final problem I have not had a chance to identify here and a problem that is also substantial. That is a current law not only goes through a list of those who would succeed to the presidency that causes the problems I have outlined but is also unclear particularly in the circumstance in which someone succeeds to the presidency because they were third, fourth, or fifth on the list and then someone else is confirmed or elected to be second on the list. What happens if there is no Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore succeeds to the presidency and then this body meets and elects a Speaker? Do we bump the person who succeeded only because they held that less-high-in-line position? That is something we need to clarify in our statutes.

So I presented a bill that solved that problem and identified that, once somebody became President, they stayed as President through the end of that term, and also identified that the second in line to serve would be either the Speaker or the minority leader, whichever was designated by the President, and whoever would serve after that would be either the majority or the minority leader of the other body. What this would assure under this scenario is that whoever succeeded to the presidency would have been elected by their State or district and selected by their colleagues for a position of national leadership, not as the President pro tempore is for a position of ceremonial honor.

Another solution, a simpler one, is to simply take Congress out of it, have the line of succession go through the Cabinet.

A final idea put forward by Norm Ornstein, a scholar who has studied in this area, is to create a list of several governors selected by the elected President to be in line of succession and have them become Federal officers by giving them a ceremonial position perhaps as head of their own National Guards so that they could be in line.

As the gentleman from Washington pointed out, it may be that we do not want the line of succession to go all through the Cabinet even to Cabinet officers not well known by the American people so a hybrid solution would be that the line of succession would go through the top five or six Cabinet officers and then to a list of five governors selected and ranked in a document filed with the House and the Senate by the then serving and inaugurated President.

So there are several ways to solve this constellation of problems. There is one thing that it is simply criminally negligent for us to do, and that is to ignore the problem until it happens. To do so invites assassination. To do so invites people around the world to wonder whether there will be a sudden shift in policy or whether the United States will be temporarily unable to respond because the identity of its President cannot be determined with a legitimacy that is accepted by all the American people.

It is time for us to act on the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 and to adopt the amendments or a change of it this year.

I thank the gentleman for his great generosity in yielding to me.

Mr. BAIRD. Mr. Speaker, could I ask my colleague a question if I may? There is a recent book out, I think, called The Vulcans, and we have read over the last couple of decades of plans for shadow governments, shadow administrations. I do not recall reading in the Constitution of the United States that the executive branch is empowered to create a shadow government. I do not recall reading it. I do recall, correctly I believe, that the Congress is empowered to provide through statutory language mechanisms to replace the President and the Vice President should those two seats be vacant.
In the gentleman's estimation and thought, as he has spent a great deal of time, which does he think would have more legitimacy with the American public, a public process enshrined in statute, debated thoroughly by the House and Senate and passed into law that gives a clear cut, unambiguous line of succession for who will be President and Vice President or a shadow government created covertly and operating covertly to run the institutions of this country without a Congress to exercise oversight?

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, clearly, the gentleman from Washington will not be surprised if I say that a clear and transparent system for installing a successor President would be preferable.
There are some plans to deal with top-level civil servants in the bureaucracy and to see if this civil servant is unavailable, that civil servant would do his or her job. But all of this must take place under a legitimate President, and the fact that our present statute has all the problems I have outlined, from ambiguity to lack of continuity of policy, creates a circumstance where we could have a careful scenario as to which bureaucrats are running what and no scenario as to who is overseeing the whole group.

Mr. BAIRD. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much for his remarks. Have there been hearings yet on the gentleman's legislation?

Mr. SHERMAN. No. As I said, I introduced it in February or May of 2001 in part because I was analyzing how our institutions could be improved in light of the difficulties of December, 2000, and I was not surprised that I was not able to get a hearing then. But in the months after September 11 when we have been so concerned about what terrorists could do to our country, I am frankly flabbergasted that the House Committee on the Judiciary has not considered amending the 1947 Presidential Succession Act.

Mr. BAIRD. Mr. Speaker, let me make one other observation that I find admirable on the gentleman's part. He and I are from the minority party. We are both Democrats. Everyone knows the administration is from the Republican side of the aisle. The gentleman's resolution assures that the President would stay in the hands of the Republican Party if he were to perish, at least the presidency would. So the gentleman is actually stepping up to the plate and saying he is ensuring that the President's Party would stay in power if the resolution were to pass and that circumstances could not create a scenario whereby, through catastrophe or assassination, the power of the presidency could shift parties. Is that accurate?

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, that is not only accurate, but it was more accurate when I initially introduced the legislation. I introduced the legislation in early 2001. I expected the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Gephardt) to become Speaker after the 2002 election; and I could just imagine how secure the undisclosed location where Vice President Cheney resided would be if the person coming after him in the line of succession was the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Gephardt), our good friend and colleague. So, yes, I introduced legislation which would have vested the presidency, had the catastrophe occurred, in a member of the party selected by the President of the United States, even if we Democrats had been in the majority in 2003 and 2004.

Mr. BAIRD. Mr. Speaker, I respect that, because one of my principles about this whole debate has been that it should not be a partisan issue. The continuity of our government is not a Republican issue. It is not a Democratic issue. It is an issue for all Americans; and, indeed, it impacts the entire world. It is admirable that the gentleman has created a mechanism in his proposal that is nonpartisan in the sense that it would allow whichever party has been elected to the presidency to maintain that role in the executive branch even under times of catastrophe, and I think that is admirable.

Is there anything else the gentleman would like to add before I move on to discuss congressional continuity?

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I just want to commend the gentleman for his work on congressional continuity, and I know that the Committee on the Judiciary may focus on congressional continuity first. I hope they focus on both these issues as soon as possible.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source