I’ve read or watched a few movies where the bad guys plot revolves around some convention where all 50 State Governors will be in attendance, with the President of the United States giving a speech, and the bad guys plan on blowing up their conference and killing all the state governors along with the President to basically cause the entire United States to be paralyzed completely allowing the bad guys to either take over or significantly weaken the United States to allow them to enact the final part of their plan.
Now ignoring the US president since we’ve seen what happens when that line of succession is forced to occur, is there REALLY any potential benefit in the bad guys getting rid of all the state governors? I understand it would be shocking to say the least, but really does it effect National Defense? I imagine the immediate line of successions that would occur in every state would make it maybe a 24 hour window for the bad guys to do whatever they want before things “go back to normal”.
Hoping not to derail the thread, I always thought that was one of the English Gunpowder Plotters’ many errors: if they’d destroyed all the landowners in Parliament, there’d still be heirs with a grievance against whichever puppet monarch they set up.
Back on topic, I doubt that it would have much effect.
I’m sure all states have legislation stating in detail what happens and who takes over if the Governor suddenly dies. Deputies and other officials would simply take over in the interim, and do what needed to be done.
Don’t all states have Lieutenant Governors? And anyway, each state’s National Guard and police has its own internal chain of command that will keep merrily chugging along, I’m sure.
Which brings up an interesting question - do states have similar rules about the Governor and LG not flying together, similar to the Pres and VP?
Some years back, in September 2003, the governor of my state was attending a meeting in Chicago when he suffered a massive stroke and died.
It was sad, but from the perspective of running the state there wasn’t even a ripple.
If all 50 state governors were murdered the disruption would be the psychological impact of mass death/assault on the country, not from inability to run the state and local governments.
During the conference the wheels of government still turn. That is despite the participants being occupied with the conference. The job of the public service is to manage the country under the direction of the various executives. The wheels will turn until there is a need for executive direction. So if you lost the POTUS and the state governors, and then some nefarious super villain attack was unleashed, you would probably be needing a few executive directions, but the 2IC of each role, down the line, would have executive power and the wheels would still turn.
The assassination kills the people filling the executive positions, but it does not destroy the substantive positions and their powers.
There is good reason for having a defined line of succession, then you are not paralysed with arguments over the succession. That would be a significant risk.
Only 5 States don’t have a Lt. Governor who would immediately take over:
" Five states do not have a position of an official lieutenant governor. In these cases, the Secretary of State or the President of the Senate is next in line for the governorship"
I can’t think of any realistic situation where someone could take advantage of a 24 hour window. In fact I think it would take much less than 24 hours for a politician who is second in command to step up and take over.
One may recall that the governor of South Carolina went fully missing for a week in 2009, which not only had no impact on state functioning but didn’t even end his political career.
There needs to be a President all the time because a military emergency could arise without warning. Neither waiting six hours for the President to, e.g., wake up from surgical anesthesia, nor stepping outside the Constitutional bounds and having military leaders make policy on their own is considered acceptable, even in an extreme situation. So, we have all sorts of rules for acting Presidents and permanent succession.
Governors don’t have comparable responsibilities. Anything they do can wait a day for the process to figure out who is in charge. Even in a desperate emergency requiring timely National Guard deployment, the federal government has the authority to nationalize the mission and the troops. Omaha isn’t going to burn down because the governor of Nebraska is in the hospital.
Losing a governor is something that happens, from time to time. And when it does, it might cause a little bit of disruption in that state, but has no effect at all on any other state. If the governor of Ohio were killed, and at the same time the governors of Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania were also killed, the deaths of those other governors would have no additional effect on Ohioans at all.
Killing all of the governors at once would just mean a little bit of disruption across the whole country, instead of just in one state at a time.
To put it in perspective, an election also causes a little bit of disruption. Often more than the death of an officeholder, because a governor’s successor is probably of the same party as the governor, but an electee might well be a different party. And we routinely have elections for governor in many states at once (not quite all of them, because each state has its own schedule for gubernatorial elections, but a lot of them).
Yeah, I suspect if the Almighty were to finish the job he started with that tree back in 1984, our state would probably actually work better than it does.
This was the plot for the 1985 Chuck Norris film Invasion U.S.A. where the terrorists final plot was to kill the President and all 50 State Governors attending an emergency conference in Atlanta. Of course you’re never told what the full terrorist plan was for after the attack.
It was also the plot for a bunch of pulp action novels I remember reading back in the day. In one case I remember it was supposed to be in advance of a full Soviet invasion of Europe, the idea being left aligned terrorists would kill the President and then the state governors individually all in the span of a day, and that would give the Soviets a crucial 24 hour advantage (the killing of the Governors was suppose to cause martial law to be declared across the United States further delaying an American mobilization to Europe)
In an administrative sense, the Several States would be able to get their Several Shits together for the most part. But there would be some leadership screw-ups that day for sure.
The big damage would be psychological and that’s going to lead to a certain amount of chaos. It would be a huge kick in the Several Nuts to lose each and every state’s leader at the same time. If a large number of other folks were killed concurrently—or maybe even if it was only the 50 governors—this would supersede 9/11 in the collective consciousness.