In my first post I said that my “cliffhangers” range from the merely interesting all the way up to full-blown constitutional crises. My favorite chapter in Constitutional Cliffhangers, Chapter 4, definitely qualifies as a crisis. Here is the opening:
The United States is deeply divided over the war. Everyone agreed that we needed to fight back when Ruritania attacked our bases, but after two years of intensive combat, things are not going well. Addressing the nation, President Joanna Lewis announces her intention to seek a negotiated settlement. The half of the country that agrees with her breathes a sigh of relief.
The other half boils with rage. Responding to the president, Speaker of the House Peg Wilton says, “We are losing this war — not because our cause is hopeless, but because we have a cowardly commander in chief. We should never surrender to fascist aggression.” “Coward” is a mild epithet compared to what other hawks call President Lewis.
Complicating matters is that a few weeks ago, the vice president suffered a fatal heart attack. President Lewis nominated a candidate to fill the vacancy, but the hawks in Congress have stalled the vote. They are motivated by their distaste for the nominee’s unsurprisingly dovish position on the war, but everyone notices that while the vice presidency is vacant, Speaker Wilton is next in line for the presidency (followed by the president pro tempore of the Senate, and then members of the cabinet, starting with the secretary of state).
As President Lewis arrives at a public event one morning, an assassin detonates a huge bomb, killing the president and dozens of others. In a homemade video produced before the assassination, the bomber decries “the coward Lewis” and announces his intention to kill Lewis so that the stalwart Wilton will become president and continue the war. Within two hours of the assassination, the video has saturated television and the Internet.
The assassin seemingly gets his wish. Wilton condemns the assassination in the most strident terms, obviously, but she takes an oath of office that morning as acting president. Her political position is tenuous. Supporters of the martyred President Lewis blame Speaker Wilton for fueling the rhetoric that led to Lewis’s assassination, and for her role in stalling to keep the vice presidency vacant. In other words, they feel as though the country has just suffered a coup d’état. They latch onto a legal argument that, just hours earlier, had been an academic one: that it is unconstitutional for the succession law to include members of Congress. Wilton’s opponents argue — with the support of several prominent legal experts — that the dovish secretary of state, John Allen, is the legitimate acting president.
Secretary Allen decides to contest Wilton’s claim to the presidency. He too takes an oath of office as acting president and, without using force, he assumes physical control of the White House. “The struggle over our war policy has been ugly, but it’s a political struggle,” he says in a national address from the Oval Office. “In America, we don’t settle political questions by mass murder.”
It has only been ten hours since the assassination — a shocking and surreal day. No violence has broken out yet, but it feels like only a matter of time before it does. No one is in the mood to compromise, and control of the government and the military hangs in the balance as Allen and Wilton vie for control.
This is my favorite chapter for many reasons. The first is that I can’t resist the potential drama of the story (a novel is in the works). The second (and my main focus in this post) is that it highlights the interaction between law and politics.
The legal issue here is complicated, but to summarize briefly: The Constitution’s Succession Clause empowers Congress only to place “officers” in the line of succession, and the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tem of the Senate (whom the statute places second and third in line, respectively) are arguably not “officers” as the Constitution uses the term. The secretary of state clearly is an officer. (I am guessing the commenters might get into the details more…)
The role of politics here is key. Even though the weight of scholarly opinion is (by my measurement) on the secretary of state’s side here, I concede that the Speaker could assume office without controversy in most cases. The general public would accept the result. Those that did not would either lack standing to challenge the succession law, or (like the secretary of state, who would have standing) would lack the political and personal will to do so.
But in a situation like the one in my opening scenario — in which the Speaker is of a different party, had a hand in maintaining the vacancy in the vice presidency, and arguably incited the vacancy in the presidency — the secretary of state might make a play for control and the country could be in real trouble.
We cannot be sure that the winner of this struggle would be the side with the stronger constitutional arguments. We can be sure that the struggle itself would shake the foundations of our government.
This odds of this happening might be long, but the stakes are incalculable. On the other side, the benefits of the status quo are minimal. The justification usually offered for Speaker succession (that the Speaker is a top elected official, representing the whole country, while cabinet members are mere appointees) doesn’t amount to much when compared to the potential peril it represents.
Even though this makes it a good candidate for reform from a cost-benefit standpoint, politics again make it hard to see this getting fixed. For various reasons, Congress is better at addressing problems that have already occurred than it is at preventing future ones. Congress is also driven by interests and the “cliffhanger-reform” movement is politically weak, while the “preserve the prestige of the Speaker” movement has a natural constituency at the Capitol.
Law, politics, and the Speaker and secretary of state trying to strangle each other. All of this and more in Constitutional Cliffhangers.