The Disorder of Succession.

• Author: Bordewich, Jean Parvin

SHOULD THE PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT BOTH DIE, YOU'D THINK WE'D HAVE A WELL-CONSIDERED PLAN TO RECONSTITUTE THE GOVERNMENT. IN FACT, WE DON'T.

Most of us who follow government know what the line of succession is should a president die in office. We see it at every State of the Union address: On the dais, the president stands in front with the vice president and the speaker of the House seated behind. Cabinet members occupy seats closest to the rostrum in the House chamber, except for the one secretary designated to stay away in the unlikely event that the whole place blows up and somebody has to run the country. Senate leaders, including the president pro tempore, sit in the rows behind them.

But recent history tells us that an event that kills all or most of the line of succession is not far-fetched. It came frighteningly close on September 11, 2001, when three airplanes piloted by terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. What if the fourth and possibly a fifth plane had hit their marks? Instead, the fourth plane, which was headed for Capitol Hill, was brought down by passengers in a field in Pennsylvania. A purported fifth plane aimed at the White House may have been thwarted when one of the terrorists was arrested.

Almost 20 years later, the events of January 6,2021, starkly reminded us again of our vulnerability. Those who attacked the Capitol that day came perilously close to being able to execute the vice president, the speaker, and Senate leaders.

But don't we have a plan to reconstitute the government quickly after almost any catastrophe? In fact, we don't. The laws and constitutional framework now in place address some scenarios adequately, but not the most dire ones.

The nightmare scenario is one that occurs, as the January 6 attack did, in the delicate period between Election Day and the inauguration. Imagine there's been an ugly, contentious election that is very close, marred by occasional outbreaks of violence and threats against election workers. The outcome is being challenged in the courts. The incoming president and vice president are dead and the speaker of the House, next in line to the presidency, represents the party that narrowly lost. Both parties are determined to claim the White House. If this political tinderbox exploded in violence, potentially decapitating the national government, it would make January 6 look tame.

This sort of scenario has long alarmed serious scholars of government in both parties, perhaps none more so than Norm Ornstein and John Fortier. In 2020, they convinced the American Enterprise Institute, where they were both resident scholars, to reconvene a commission on the continuity of government as a follow-up to a similar commission they led at AEI and the Brookings Institution after 9/11. The new bipartisan 14-member Continuity of Government Commission, which began meeting in earnest in 2021, was co-chaired by Arthur B. Culvahouse, a White House counsel in the Reagan administration, and Donna Shalala, secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration and a former member of Congress. Fortier served as executive director of both commissions and Ornstein as senior adviser. Almost nothing had been done by Congress since 2001, yet new threats continued to emerge-- the anthrax mailings starting a week after 9/11 that killed five people and sickened congressional staff and members, attempted assassinations of House members of both parties, the coronavirus pandemic, and January 6.

This renewed commission, on which I served, issued its recommendations on continuity of Congress in April 2022 and on presidential succession last December, to little fanfare. A House select committee held a hearing on congressional continuity and recommended establishing a joint select committee to study it, but it would take a constitutional amendment to change the requirement to fill House vacancies by election. Problems related to presidential succession aren't as difficult to fix, however. They...