Who becomes the leader of our nation if the President and Vice President were to die in the same day?
In order:
Office Current Officer
1 Vice President Joe Biden
2 Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
3 President pro tempore of the Senate Robert Byrd
4 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
5 Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner
6 Secretary of Defense Robert Gates[2]
7 Attorney General Eric Holder
8 Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar
9 Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack
10 Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke
11 Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis
12 Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius
13 Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan
14 Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood
15 Secretary of Energy Steven Chu
16 Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
17 Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki
18 Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano
The Speaker of the House.
Sure, but what if they were all on the same doomed flight together. Then what? Huh?
This raises the question of where the order of succession is defined that deep, and for agencies that new…
Which Tom Clancy novel was it, where the Japanese commercial airliner crashes into the U.S. capital building during some formal swearing in event with both houses and the president, vice president, and every chief justice in attendance? Everyone dies and Jack Ryan ends up as the President.
I believe that Jack Ryan had been appointed VP scant moments before the event in that novel.
Debt of Honor. And it wasn’t that everybody died. Ryan had just been sworn in as Vice President before the plane hit the Capitol.
They make sure the Prez and the Veep aren’t ever on the same plane.
dont they start picking speakers from the states based on order they became a state? all the way down the list. its pretty complex almost like the royal family but not quiet
And a cabinet member not in the line of succession is always deliberately excluded from ceremonies, like the State of the Union speech, to which all the others are expected to attend. That person is at a safe distance in case of a nuclear attack or an alien invasion or, well, anything.
The Presidential Succession Act spells it out First come the VP, Speaker, and Senate pro tem, then the cabinet officers in the order in which their departments were created.
So by law, the newly created Department of Homeland Security was added to the bottom of the list in 2002. Any subsequently created departments would follow that. When an agency is disbanded or a position is dropped from the cabinet (eg., Post Master General), they are removed from the succession list.
The Speaker of the House and President pro tempore of the Senate were added to the top of the list in 1947 by an act of Congress. President Truman argued that the nation’s highest elected officials should take precedence over appointed officials.
The bottom line is that we have a contingency plan and it goes down 18 positions. If someone nuked D.C. on the wrong day we’d lose everyone in the plan and we’d be without a president or a plan to get a new one.
I’d assume martial law would take effect and the ranking military officer in the country would maintain order. The existing laws would replace the positions of Speaker of the House and President Pro-tempore of the Senate(either immediately, as some congressman or senator probably was out of the area at any given time, or later as the states would follow the rules to choose new ones) and thus repopulate the presidency.
All cabinet members are on the order of succession, and in the order of the creation of their agencies. Homeland Security was the most recently-created Cabinet-level agency, so the Secretary of Homeland Security is the last on the line of succession.
And if you think that’s a deep line of succession, take a look at any monarchy.
Not that 18 is excessive, but (and I don’t have time to look today) I thought this was all covered in the Const. itself until the Cabinet part, and after that, didn’t know where it comes from. Gotta see more cites personally about the Truman claim, seems to me I recall reading more about this in the Constitutional Debates, which makes me wonder if ti didn’t happen, or why it would wait until 194 to happen.
Of course I could be wrong, just no time to check right now.
Yep. He or she is typically referred to as the “designated successor” or “designated survivor”.
There is a list of who has served as the designated survivor on wikipedia:
Don’t you mean a “cabinet member in the line of succession”?
No, that has nothing to do with it. Speakers are chosen due to political considerations.
To start with, any formal event is missing either the Vice Prexsident or one cabinet member, who is the designated successor-in-case-of-disaster for that event. The Inauguration, the State of the Union Address, etc. – one cabinet member is selected – I think they do it on a rotating basis by lot – to visit Ames IA or Fort Pierce FL or Casper WY, at the time the rest are convened at the Capital.
Let’s not forget that under the 25th Amendment, the President (whether the guy elected in November or the guy succeeding under the Succession Act) nominates a Vice President who takes office after receiving a majority vote in each house of Congress. So if Joe Biden keeled over tomorrow, Mr. Obama would nominate someone to serve as Vice President, and the Senate and House would ‘elect’ him to the job by ratifying the President’s choice.
The 18-deep list is there in case of natural disaster, terrorist attack, etc., taking out a large group of the potential successors simultaneously.
I have a question related to this. Now I know this is highly unrealistic and totally the product of an unrestrained imagination lacking any sort of mental acuity – but try to bear with me.
Say, a hypothetical bomb managed to kill the following at the exact same time:
0 President Obama
1 Vice President Joe Biden
2 Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
3 President pro tempore of the Senate Robert Byrd
4 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
The person who committed this egregious crime would be none other than Mister Timothy Geithner.
Now, indulge me further and let’s pretend he wasn’t caught until after he was sworn in. In this outlandish scenario of mine, after his plot was discovered and he was convicted, would the new VP, (or more likely from what I understand the President pro tem) be raised to being a POTUS or would the original line of succession still be in effect?
Would the office of president go to Timothy Geithner’s new VP, Robert Gates or Daniel Inouye(or maybe someone else)?