Bush served as president for eight hours while President Ronald Reagan had surgery. Proponents of the act thought cabinet officers had better experience to serve as president. Truman signs the Presidential Succession Act of , changing the line of succession to vice president, then speaker of the House, then Senate president pro tempore.
Brad Sherman D-CA explores reforming the presidential line of succession by removing both the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate, and expanding the list to include the ambassadors to the United Nations and those ambassadors to the four permanent member nations of the United Nations Security Council.
March 9, - The USA Patriot Improvement and Reauthorization Act of is signed into law, adding the secretary of homeland security to the list for the first time, at the end.
Vice Presidential Succession. Section 2 of the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution: Whenever there is vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both houses of Congress. If the vice president is unable to serve, the president nominates a replacement, which must be confirmed by Congress. If something happened to the president before a vice presidential nominee is confirmed, the line of succession of president would fall to the speaker of the House.
There is no timeline on when the president must nominate a replacement. Part of the reason why these puzzles persist is that we have not experienced Section 4 in action—and we therefore lack precedents to discipline legal analysis, generate shared understandings, and narrow the scope of discretion. One might expect that a constitutional amendment as recent as the Twenty-Fifth would be easier to apply than a provision adopted centuries ago, but the very novelty of Section 4 has prevented its meaning from becoming at all settled.
The one place in American life where Section 4 has been used repeatedly is in movies, novels, and television shows, and this suggests a final lesson. On popular TV series such as 24 and House of Cards and in thrillers such as The Enemy Within , Section 4 has been at the center of elaborate plots to steal the presidency.
If, as some scholars have argued, the more realistic risk is that Vice Presidents and Cabinet officers will be too timid about calling out presidential inability when it exists, these associations of Section 4 with Machiavellian maneuvering are unhelpful. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is unusual.
Most amendments are about individual rights or governmental powers; the Twenty-Fifth is one of a small number of amendments about technical procedures. This essay will discuss why such amendments are so unusual, how the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was able to break that pattern, and how technical amendments like the Twenty-Fifth are susceptible to errors and omissions.
The U. Constitution is one of the most difficult constitutions in the world to amend. But the really hard part of passing an amendment is getting Congress to deal with it in the first place. Being a good idea is not enough to make something happen in Congress. Congress has limited space on its agenda, and typically it takes action only when doing so serves the interests of politically powerful constituencies.
There must be something in it for them. This is what makes the Twenty-Fifth Amendment so special. It was not a response to a surging political movement, and its terms were not directed at preventing a repeat of some recent disaster. It was just a good idea whose time had come.
Other than portions of the Twentieth Amendment, no other amendment came into the Constitution so much on its own intellectual merits. How did it happen, then? There were three important factors. First, on presidential disability, the impetus for change came from the White House. In Congress, hundreds of representatives and senators each consider hundreds of issues and balance the interests of hundreds of clamoring interest groups.
By contrast, when President Eisenhower suffered his serious health issues, he was just one man presented with one very stark reality: if he ever got really sick, the Constitution would not handle it well. This was particularly problematic in the middle of the Cold War. Second, the shocking assassination of President Kennedy in November created a brief window of opportunity, during which the nation was more inclined than usual to look at issues outside of the usual interest-group politics.
Third, and probably most important, was the extraordinary leadership of Senator Birch Bayh. The subcommittee had already been considering these issues, but Bayh committed energy and political capital to making the project a high congressional priority. Unusually, he did this despite the lack of an obvious, immediate political payoff.
The national committee of the affected party would choose a new candidate. If the candidate dies after the election but before the Electoral College meets in mid-December, the national party would again choose a replacement and the electors would vote for that person, Fortier said. If the death or resignation happens after Congress counts the electoral votes but before Inauguration Day, the 20th Amendment provides that the vice president becomes president.
If both the president and the vice president become incapacitated, the Constitution doesn't directly provide the answer. But a federal law, the Presidential Succession Act, fills in that blank.
First in line to serve as the acting president is the House speaker, now Nancy Pelosi, followed by the president pro tem of the Senate, who is now Chuck Grassley of Iowa, followed by members of the Cabinet. But Pelosi or Grassley might be reluctant to accept the role, because they would be required to resign from Congress in order to take the position and could serve only until Congress finally decided who the president will be.
However, Section 3 and 4 established new roles for the Vice President if the President were unable to perform his or her official duties. Section 3 allows for a President to communicate a disability to Congress and it has been done several times when Presidents have undergone routine medical procedures. Under Section 3, the Vice President temporarily acts as President.
Section 4 deals with a different scenario — when a President is unable or unwilling to communicate a disability. Under Section 4, the Vice President, either acting with the Cabinet or a group designated by Congress, can declare the President disabled. Certainly, one potential constitutional crisis would be the lack of a Vice President in office to start a Section 4 disability review of a President.
Another is the lack of a constitutional or legal precedent for someone to act as a temporary Vice President, to start the Section 4 review process.
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