lederhosen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lederhosen) wrote2006-11-09 05:46 pm
lederhosen) wrote2006-11-09 05:46 pm
Entry tags:
President Pelosi?
I've seen several people on my f-list noting that Nancy Pelosi is now just after Cheney in the succession to the US Presidency (or rather, will be from January), and entertaining scenarios where Bush and Cheney are both removed from office via impeachment to give the USA its first female president.
I've posted here about why this is not likely to happen (in brief: it would need at least 16 Republican votes in the Senate to get either of them removed from office, and even if they'd done something so damning that you could find 16 Republicans willing to do it, they'd undoubtedly insist on impeaching them one at a time so the vacancy could be filled by appointment).
What bugs me more, though, is the idea that - if this was politically feasible - it would be a desirable thing to do.
A series of laws (most recently the Presidential Succession Act of 1947) have established a long chain of people who succeed to the Presidency in the event that the President dies or is removed from office for some reason. If the President's gone, the VP gets the job. If the VP's gone, the Speaker of the House gets it. And so on down the line to the Secretary for Veterans' Affairs. (Note that a couple of people currently in the chain would be skipped because they weren't born in the USA, but that still leaves 15 potential successors.)
But the USA is, at least by intent, a democracy, and the preferred method of selecting the president is by voting every four years. The preferred method for selecting the VP is also by voting every four years, and failing that by presidential nomination. (You will note that there is not an automatic succession to the position of VP should the existing one vacate the position; that choice is left in the hands of the President, subject to confirmation by House & Senate, as detailed in the 25th Amendment.)
The chain of succession is an emergency provision, intended to provide some stability and certainty in chaotic times when it isn't possible to choose a successor by the usual process - if BAD TOM CLANCY NOVEL PLOT HERE has just wiped out the President and Vice-President, you're probably in a bad enough mess that the last thing you want is to be standing around bickering about who's in charge of the country. Going out of one's way to create that emergency, in order to install a Democratic president in a country that elected a Republican one*, does not exactly serve the interests of national stability.
To illustrate the above from history, it's not particularly uncommon for the VP to succeed to the Presidency (it's happened nine times in US history, or about once in every six presidential terms). The chain of succession has never needed to go past the Vice-Presidency, though it's come close a couple of times:
- In 1865, Lincoln was assassinated and his VP, Andrew Johnson became President. At the time there wasn't a provision for replacing a VP without an election, and so Johnson served out his term without a VP. In 1868, Johnson was impeached and avoided conviction by a single vote in the Senate.
- In 1973, Nixon's VP Spiro Agnew resigned over allegations of corruption. Nixon nominated Gerald Ford to replace Agnew, but the Watergate scandal was already blowing up; had Nixon resigned or been removed from office before Ford's confirmation, the House Speaker (Carl Albert, a Democrat) would have succeeded to the office.
Albert decided that it would be inappropriate for him, as a Democrat, to take a position that the voters had given to a Republican, and so declared that if such a thing happened, he would serve as an acting president until Congress had confirmed a Republican VP, and then resign. (As it happened, Ford was confirmed before Nixon resigned, so it didn't come to that.)
There is a strong lesson there. I think you all know how I feel about the Republican Party, and I will be glad to see the day when the USA is able to elect a female president... but the key word there is elect. Some day the USA will have its first president, and I want to be able to look at that and say "The US public acknowledged that a woman was capable of doing that job", not "we managed to foist a Democratic woman on the people who voted for a Republican man". That would be a pretty empty sort of victory, and exploiting emergency provisions to achieve a political end is not that different from some of the stuff we've been condemning when Republicans do it.
I'd also like to remind my fellow Australians of what happened here, back in 1975. Proportional representation means that if a federal Australian senator dies or resigns in the middle of their term, they can't simply be replaced by by-elections. Instead, the premier of the state in question got to appoint their replacement, which by non-legally-binding convention was whoever the ex-senator's party nominated.
In 1975, during the Whitlam Labor government, that convention was broken twice. Labor senator Lionel Murphy was appointed to the High Court, and the NSW Premier appointed an independent to replace him rather than Labor's candidate.
A few months later, another Labor senator - this one from Queensland - died in office. Instead of Labor's nominee, the Premier of Queensland (Bjelke-Petersen, National Party) appointed Albert Field, who was an ALP member but opposed to Whitlam. This appointment gave the anti-Whitlam side the numbers they needed in the Senate to bring down the Whitlam Government, resulting in the Governor-General's appointment of a Liberal Party Prime Minister to run a country that had elected Labor.
Thirty years on, this episode is still the cause of a great deal of bitterness and division among Australians. If we despise Bjelke-Petersen's actions as unethical (albeit legal), we should be equally reluctant to advocate such tactics ourselves.
*And if you believe the 2004 elections were rigged, and his election was illegitimate, that should be dealt with by investigating that particular attack on democracy rather than trying to balance it out by attacking democracy again from the other side.
I've posted here about why this is not likely to happen (in brief: it would need at least 16 Republican votes in the Senate to get either of them removed from office, and even if they'd done something so damning that you could find 16 Republicans willing to do it, they'd undoubtedly insist on impeaching them one at a time so the vacancy could be filled by appointment).
What bugs me more, though, is the idea that - if this was politically feasible - it would be a desirable thing to do.
A series of laws (most recently the Presidential Succession Act of 1947) have established a long chain of people who succeed to the Presidency in the event that the President dies or is removed from office for some reason. If the President's gone, the VP gets the job. If the VP's gone, the Speaker of the House gets it. And so on down the line to the Secretary for Veterans' Affairs. (Note that a couple of people currently in the chain would be skipped because they weren't born in the USA, but that still leaves 15 potential successors.)
But the USA is, at least by intent, a democracy, and the preferred method of selecting the president is by voting every four years. The preferred method for selecting the VP is also by voting every four years, and failing that by presidential nomination. (You will note that there is not an automatic succession to the position of VP should the existing one vacate the position; that choice is left in the hands of the President, subject to confirmation by House & Senate, as detailed in the 25th Amendment.)
The chain of succession is an emergency provision, intended to provide some stability and certainty in chaotic times when it isn't possible to choose a successor by the usual process - if BAD TOM CLANCY NOVEL PLOT HERE has just wiped out the President and Vice-President, you're probably in a bad enough mess that the last thing you want is to be standing around bickering about who's in charge of the country. Going out of one's way to create that emergency, in order to install a Democratic president in a country that elected a Republican one*, does not exactly serve the interests of national stability.
To illustrate the above from history, it's not particularly uncommon for the VP to succeed to the Presidency (it's happened nine times in US history, or about once in every six presidential terms). The chain of succession has never needed to go past the Vice-Presidency, though it's come close a couple of times:
- In 1865, Lincoln was assassinated and his VP, Andrew Johnson became President. At the time there wasn't a provision for replacing a VP without an election, and so Johnson served out his term without a VP. In 1868, Johnson was impeached and avoided conviction by a single vote in the Senate.
- In 1973, Nixon's VP Spiro Agnew resigned over allegations of corruption. Nixon nominated Gerald Ford to replace Agnew, but the Watergate scandal was already blowing up; had Nixon resigned or been removed from office before Ford's confirmation, the House Speaker (Carl Albert, a Democrat) would have succeeded to the office.
Albert decided that it would be inappropriate for him, as a Democrat, to take a position that the voters had given to a Republican, and so declared that if such a thing happened, he would serve as an acting president until Congress had confirmed a Republican VP, and then resign. (As it happened, Ford was confirmed before Nixon resigned, so it didn't come to that.)
There is a strong lesson there. I think you all know how I feel about the Republican Party, and I will be glad to see the day when the USA is able to elect a female president... but the key word there is elect. Some day the USA will have its first president, and I want to be able to look at that and say "The US public acknowledged that a woman was capable of doing that job", not "we managed to foist a Democratic woman on the people who voted for a Republican man". That would be a pretty empty sort of victory, and exploiting emergency provisions to achieve a political end is not that different from some of the stuff we've been condemning when Republicans do it.
I'd also like to remind my fellow Australians of what happened here, back in 1975. Proportional representation means that if a federal Australian senator dies or resigns in the middle of their term, they can't simply be replaced by by-elections. Instead, the premier of the state in question got to appoint their replacement, which by non-legally-binding convention was whoever the ex-senator's party nominated.
In 1975, during the Whitlam Labor government, that convention was broken twice. Labor senator Lionel Murphy was appointed to the High Court, and the NSW Premier appointed an independent to replace him rather than Labor's candidate.
A few months later, another Labor senator - this one from Queensland - died in office. Instead of Labor's nominee, the Premier of Queensland (Bjelke-Petersen, National Party) appointed Albert Field, who was an ALP member but opposed to Whitlam. This appointment gave the anti-Whitlam side the numbers they needed in the Senate to bring down the Whitlam Government, resulting in the Governor-General's appointment of a Liberal Party Prime Minister to run a country that had elected Labor.
Thirty years on, this episode is still the cause of a great deal of bitterness and division among Australians. If we despise Bjelke-Petersen's actions as unethical (albeit legal), we should be equally reluctant to advocate such tactics ourselves.
*And if you believe the 2004 elections were rigged, and his election was illegitimate, that should be dealt with by investigating that particular attack on democracy rather than trying to balance it out by attacking democracy again from the other side.
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Step One: Buy Bush a nice biug bag of pretzels.
Step Two: Take to leaping out from behind obstruction and screaming "Boo!" everything Cheney wanders by.
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It's not enough just to get a democrat/liberal/woman/black/foo into the presidency. If the public does not support their being in that position then they'll resent that person which in turn will only set back the point where such a person would be considered acceptable in the position ("Well just look at the last time we had a woman in the whitehouse").
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