I heard that the US air force has a squadron of planes flying 24/7 carrying a shadow military government in case of a nuclear holocaust and the Presidential Succession Act fails to find a replacement president.
Now is this true, and if so, can you provide details on this (URL maybe)? Who appoints this shadow government? Would this government be constitutionally valid?
I highly doubt this is true. The succession of power in the US is well defined and think tanks have come up with all sorts of scenarios under which the US might be attacked and how things would play out.
Considering we have significant command and control functions established in bunkers such as NORAD (to name just one) it would be very difficult for an enemy to strike with sufficient force to knock everything out at once. Add to that carrier strike groups, military bases scattered all over the world and so on and you can see it would be near impossible to get them all in a quick strike. As a result why fly people around 24/7? It doesn’t really gain you anything.
We used to fly nuclear armed bombers 24/7 but I think this was stopped in the 90’s. It was provacative and dangerous and we have our ballistic submarine fleet that provides a 24/7 nuclear threat that is near impossible to take out sufficiently to guarantee a counterstrike can’t come from them.
Remember that the military is NOT the government in the US. If the US government is somehow hamstrung the military will proceed under standing orders till a civilian government can be reconstituted. I think (hope) most of our military leaders agree with our system sufficiently to not use an opportunity where the government is smashed to seize permanent control.
But apparently the chain of succession is not fully defined. The act
http://www.doctorzebra.com/prez/a_act1947now.htm is quite vague if the whole cabinet is disabled…
Not really, if I recall, after the cabinet is wiped out, it goes through the Senators and then through the Reps. This is just recalling High School Civics, no cite.
The nice thing about the U.S. government is that it is self-reassembling. Even if everyone in the official line of succession is killed, the House has the power to elect a new Speaker, who immediately ascends to the Presidency. If Congress is killed off as well, the state governors and legislatures can appoint new Representatives to take their places. These Representatives can then get together and elect a Speaker, who immediately ascends to the Presidency, etc.
-Psi Cop
The Presidential Succession Act is not “vague” about succession beyond the Cabinet officers, it is entirely silent. And there is no provision for succession “through the Senators and then through the Reps.”
This topic (including the OP) was covered recently in some depth in the thread Presidential succession: The B List.
No. In the case of a vacancy in the House of Representatives, the state executive can call an election, but does not have the power to appoint someone directly to the vacancy. See Article I, s. 2, para. 5:
The situation is slightly different for the Senate. The 17th Amendment provides that the state executive shall call an election to fill a vacancy, unless the state legislature has authorised the state executive to appoint someone until the next regular election:
I think that most states have passed laws authorising the governor to appoint, so the Senate could be reconstituted in a matter of days, provided there are enough governors still around. Reconstituting the House would likely take much longer, depending on the election laws of each state.
I think the OP may be referring to the “shadow government” that Bush announced a year ago. As far as I can tell, it’s not about supplementing the presidential line of succession, but to ensure that there is sufficient administrative support for the new President in the event a catastrophe knocks out the White House and Washington. In other words, when Dick Cheney is at that “undisclosed location,” he’s not all on his lonesome. He’s got staffers from the various federal departments who can pull the levers to keep the machinery of government turning over if Washington takes a hit.
Here’s a BBC article on it from a year ago: Washington Sets up Shadow Government, and one from the Washington Post: Shadow Government is at Work in Secret.
Personally, I wish the Bushies hadn’t used the term “shadow government” because there are already enough on the lunatic fringe who believe that there’s a secret government thats really running the country, and using this term just encourages them. A better term might have been “contingency administration” or something like that. See The Shadow Government and The Secret Shadow Government - A Structural Analysis. (You’ll notice that the usual suspects of the Federal Reserve Bank, the Tri-lateral Commission, the New World Order and UFOs figure in these pages.)
Bah. Yes, I stand corrected. I had confused the procedures. However, I believe the ability would still stand for the Senate. The President pro tempore of the senate is number four on the list, I believe. The Senate could convene upon appointment by their states, and elect a President pro tempore. In the absence of the other three (President, Vice President, and Speaker), wouldn’t this person immediately ascend to the Presidency upon being elected?
Also, from your own link, there is this section:
I note that it doesn’t specify how the “Writs of Election” should be issued. Is there some legal case that would prevent each state from calling elections the next day on pieces of paper dropped in lockboxes? I think the public would forgive the haste, given the circumstance.
-Psi Cop
Yes, a newly elected Senate president pro tem would succeed directly to the Presidency:
3 U.S.C. § 19(b). A Speaker or a Senate president pro tem who succeeds to a vacant Presidency serves out the unexpired Presidential term–as opposed to a Cabinet officer, who serves only until a Speaker or a Senate president pro tem becomes available. 3 U.S.C. § 19(d)(2).
But Psi Cop, you were not mistaken when you wrote that “the House has the power to elect a new Speaker, who immediately ascends to the Presidency.” While a vacancy for a representative cannot be filled except by a new election, the surviving representatives–however many there are–still constitute the House of Representatives, and can still elect a Speaker in spite of the vacancies. I will check, but I believe that the House’s quorum is determined without regard to vacant seats, so the surviving representatives can muster a quorum even if most representatives have been killed off.
The rules for special elections are a matter of state law. Each state regulates the manner of holding a special election, which always requires some advance notice.
Here is a citation for this statement:
Forgive me if the OP knows about this already, but it appears he/she may be referring to the now-retired fleet of EC-135 Looking Glass aircraft that were intended to serve as airborne command posts in the event of an all-out nuclear exchange between the US and the old Soviet Union. According to link below, the planes were withdrawn from continousl airborn alert status in 1990, and taken out of service entirely in 1998.
More on Looking Glass, with pix:
Forgive me if the OP knows about this already, but it appears he/she may be referring to the now-retired fleet of EC-135 Looking Glass aircraft that were intended to serve as airborne command posts in the event of an all-out nuclear exchange between the US and the old Soviet Union. According to link below, the planes were withdrawn from continuous airborne alert status in 1990, and taken out of service entirely in 1998.
More on Looking Glass, with pix:
There was no Constitutional provision for the replacement of a Vice President who resigns office under a cloud of scandal. We found a way out of that hole. One of the great strengths of the USA is how we are able to make things work without having to spell everything out beforehand. The day we can no longe do that is the day we suffocate ourselves.
I assume that the “Constitutional provision for the replacement of a Vice President” that you are referring to is the 25th amendment, and that the “Vice President who resigns office under a cloud of scandal” was Vice President Agnew. But there was no causal relatonship between the 25th amendment’s ratification and Agnew’s resignation.
When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Vice President Johnson’s succession to the Presidency left a vacancy in the Vice Presidency–a situation that had occurred after the other seven vice-presidential successions, but that was suddenly far less acceptable in the nuclear era, with a Cold War on. The crisis was exacerbated because the next two successors in line for the Presidency were 71-year-old House Speaker John McCormack and 86-year-old Senate President pro tem Carl Hayden, who had been chosen for reasons other than their fitness as Presidential successors. The crisis was solved (up to a point, at least) by the 25th amendment, which was proposed in 1965 and ratified in 1967.
Spiro Agnew did not achieve national prominence until his nomination for the Vice Presidency in 1968. The kickback scandal that drove Agnew from office did not break until 1973. The resulting vacancy was the first one filled under the 25th amendment, which allowed an unbroken constitutional succession when President Nixon also resigned less than a year later.
One of the United States’ great strengths is that we do prepare for unexpected contingencies so that, when the unexpected or unthinkable happens, we can rely on the rule of law rather than letting might make right. In the chaos that would follow a successful decapitation strike, we would surely want clear lawful authority establishing who was in charge, lest the government dissolve into a muddle of military commanders and second-tier civilian leaders competing for primacy.