>> to figure out how to make this work. i'm just an attorney, but as an attorney i do think the commission has diagnosed some very real, very serious problems and develop some very serious and important solutions. and so i guess it's time for the political experts and legislative strategists to tell us how to get this done. thank you. >> i don't know, i think you have a bright future as a

political strategist. figuring out a way to turn a losing situation into a winning one, historically. that's promising. norm. >> thanks, tom. first let me say this report and much other information is available on our website, which is www.continuity of governmen government.org and i urge you all to go there and look at some of the very able links which include some of the hearings that were actually done. and i want to get a special shout out to jimbo who, when he was a staff director of the subcommittee on the constitution that senator kerry actually ran for the only hearing that we have had on presidential succession. it was a joint hearing with the rules committee in the senate which also has jurisdiction and unfortunately nothing has come of it ended for reasons martin

frost suggested over almost the last eight years we have really tried repeatedly to get congressional leaders, the speakers of the house, the majority and minority leaders, of the senate to understand their fiduciary understanding to protect their own institutions, but also to focus on the need for statutory changes for presidential succession. and the supreme court which is actually in even worse shape because we really have nothing there except a statutory quorum requirement of six. and i won't go into the great detail of one of the more interesting anecdotes of the morning of 9/11. let me just say that the judicial conference of the united states was meeting at the supreme court, barely 150 yards from the capital the morning that united 93 was almost certainly headed for the capitol dome. and that meant all of the leadership of our federal

judiciary, all the members of the supreme court, the chief judges of the appeals courts, most of the other leadership were sitting there within a very short distance of what would have been if that plane had hit the cast-iron dome, i see an shower going for long distance of a molten cast-iron, chunks of marble and concrete, burning jet fuel and the like, that could have created catastrophe. and given the fog of war issue that jamie so eloquently talked about, if we had such an event at the inaugural, the worst-case scenario, and you get a bunch of people popping up after we have lost the incoming and outgoing president and vice president and almost everybody formerly in the line of succession, with some questions about who remains, people popping up and saying i'm in charge here. having a supreme court to adjudicate rather than having 13 separate appeal court each popping up and saying well, we will have an opinion on this,

becomes even more important to guarantee some sense of assurance in people that we actually have that line of succession. at also add that i have pled with chief justice roberts to take on his role as the fiduciary for the court and do something about this, and he has not indicated any interest either. so with that, just one other note on the fog of war issue. i participated with fran townsend actually in a wargame. anybody who has done one of these wargames, which extend over a couple of days, with a plausible sonar you of some catastrophe taking place knows how much we do not know how little we have been able to prepare, how you get into situations where the information is ambiguous if an attack is taking place, what kind of attack, what might follow. and you get people in the room who play the major players, and try to come up with different decisions that will take place

and what the repercussions would be. you realize how little we know, how poorly we are prepared. one of the things that fran did as homeland security adviser, was to mandate that cabinet members and senior white house staff do these wargames. but she met with enormous resistance again for the human reasons, because it meant taking one or two or three days on a periodic basis out of their extraordinarily busy schedules and going offsite somewhere to go through these scenarios. after doing it, they all said how viable it was, how it opened their eyes to problems they had not known existed. but getting them to do it again without having a president directly ordering them to do it became almost impossible. so we've got problems. we know that we have focused on some of these issues and problems before. and we know that presidential succession was, and keeping the continuity of government was very much in the minds of our leaders during the cold war era.

and we know among other things they set up an elaborate bunker, secret bunker at the greenbriar resort faraway from washington. that is now a tourist attraction that you can go to. hardened with food supplies, with a mini chamber so that congress could get down there in the event of a nuclear attack. but of course it was all set up with the premise that once the missiles were logged in from siberia, we would have enough time to hustle the members away, and helicopters, entrées, perhaps in some instances by car, to get them out of the danger zone. what we now know after 9/11, and should have realized even before that is the kind of attack we are talking about in the modern era don't come with any notice. and can be of a devastating variety and require a different response. and it's a response that might have come because if you get

three, four or five nuclear bombs spread around washington set off at the same time, you could wipe out the entire cabinet without them having to be in the same room in the hardened location. we know from anthrax attack on the senate that it is not at all out of the question that you could get a kind of biological attack or a chemical attack that could get into a system and incapacitate government. we need to think about the worst case scenario. we also know though that through history we have seen this pattern repeated. a pattern built on inertia, built on the human nature that we all see with very smart people who don't write wills. even when they have small children, there are serious issues of whether you have a plan in place for who would take care of your kids if you happen to die together. because it's easy to rationalize the way because nobody likes to contemplate the prospect of their own demise.

and basically because there's a superstition involved also, that maybe if you do something it would encourage the actual outcome that you fear the most. if you look at presidential succession, we at other periods where we are in much greater danger, lengthy periods where we had no vice president and we did not have congress in session and you didn't have the cabinet in place. it took several events, assassinations of presidents, to lead to and to spur changes in the presidential succession act. and now since 1947, even though we've had dangers before and we did finally get some action thanks to john feerick and birch by and a few others to actually clarify some elements of presidential discussion in the hardest way possible through a constitutional amendment, but the easier fashion of reform of the presidential succession act passively not been on the table,

even though we know these issues exist. .com is a responsible way to do with this is to look at worst-case scenarios. the odds may be small. they may be very small, but we know they are not zero. we know they are not in intestinal. we know that in fact the odds of worst-case scenarios increased as we get easier access to a variety of mass destruction that can be used by large numbers of people, not just by nationstates are in getting insurance against those worst cases is a simple thing to do. it's not a costly thing to do. the reason we have some of these recommendations in the report, including having people from outside of washington in the line of succession, is because the worst-case scenario really is that you wipe out everybody who is in that line. and it's no longer just a matter of having one event of the state of the union where you get a cabinet member who can be

offsite. there are many others. we were able to get, fortunately, this time around a variation of the corn and approach for this in our girl. thanks to the core operation, both of the bush administration going out and the obama administration coming in, but also thanks to the good fortune that there was a cabinet member who was continuing in place, the secretary of defense, who stayed away from the inaugural. and we got the cooperation to have the secretary of homeland security, michael chertoff, stay beyond the inaugural, be away from sight so if anything happened, he could direct the homeland security response. next time around we may not have that, and we need to think about ways in which we can deal with it because of the niger is the worst-case. but finding a way to make sure that we protect worst-case and arias is the fiduciary responsibility of our leaders to

insist that if we have a period of martial law, it is as short as possible, that we get our constitutional institutions of government up and running quickly. that there is no question about who was actually in charge and that we get some responsiveness to the will of the people as we go along. there are ways to do it. these are not written in stone. we thought very carefully and evaded, weighing some of those issues. and all we really ask for now is that we begin to get some hearings and debate in congress so that we can move forward, not having to wait, although i think jamie is right, and then have the american people say why didn't you do something before. >> norm, i disagree that you necessarily have to wait. i think all that is required is

for some group of people to convince either nancy pelosi or harry reid that this needs to be done now. you just need to have one congressional leader who says we are going to do this and we will do whatever is required to get it done. i don't know how you accomplish that, but i mean, i think that's the first order of business. >> and we have seen when speaker pelosi puts her mind to something things have a way of happening. i would like to press you a bit on the issue of whether congressional leaders should be removed from a line of succession. this is one of the more controversial proposals, one that seems to ensure that a broader effort doesn't go forward so one could say on purely pragmatic grounds leave it out, it's problematic.

and i would like to get the reaction of the others of you as well. i'm a first branch of government guy. you know, i believe in the importance of congress. its particular role in the institution. and i'm wondering why a genuine sense of institutional pride and commitment, patriotism, wouldn't leave one to leave the speaker, the president pro tem has no business in that line of succession because they have more important work to do. that is to say, in the event that losing our president and vice president, the congress has a critical role to play, and why not, therefore, allow for an executive branch transition for an executive branch position in

maintaining the continuity if it's there of the congress itself. especially in the context of a politics where parties are so important in the delegitimizing of government if you have any effect a non-electoral transition of party control government. >> the argument is that whoever happens to be, separate us from the current individuals who occupy these officers, but whoever happens to be speaker and whoever happens to be the majority leader are national figures. now, maybe they didn't used to be before communications change, but they are truly national political leaders who travel the country and to deal with the broad problems affecting the country. and i would argue that they probably have a broader knowledge and a broader political exposure and anyone else in the cabinet.

and so it's not just because i was a member of congress. i happen to think that from the country's standpoint that these may be the single most competent, broad gauged political figures after the president and the vice president. it didn't used to be that way, but our country has changed. >> let me take that debate to the next level. it seems to me that in keeping congressional leaders and the line of succession, you vastly increase the potential for medical intrigue, for a possible advantage in terms of having a national figure, albeit someone who was elected from only one state or only one district. and it's that political intrigue that will just undermine legitimacy in almost every scenario you can imagine, even

an intraparty transfer of party. >> jamie, i don't see it that way because i think these particular individuals, even though they come from one state or they come from one district are recognized by the public at large as national figures are people on national death. >> even seating that point, let's say that's true. you still have the issue of political intrigue, which is the potential for changing parties or changing wings of the party. and given the issues that have surrounded almost every assassination, declaration of the inability of a president to serve, you can imagine all sorts of monkey business. and even if there weren't any, people would imagine it. which is delegitimizing. >> just to make one modest

point. essentially both of you are right, and this is a debate that frankly we are not only having today, the country has had this for over 200 years from james madison on one side to harry truman on the other side of this question. what i would offer is really sort of following up on what jamie said earlier about when you were in that log war situation, when you are truly in this sort of extreme situation where for the first time in our nations history we have neither a president or vice president, the need for clarity. antony, let's say it's a tie between the two of you, i tie between madison and in trueman, i think the tie goes to what is sort of unimpeachably clear and so there isn't any unconstitutional about. i think there is some doubt among some of our most prominent scholars, why not construe that doubt in favor of removal. >> navia mention, let me just give one historic comeback, that backs up what jamie said. keep in mind that after lincoln

was assassinated and andrew johnson became president, he was impeached by the house and came within one vote of being convicted and removed from the office by the senate. at that time the next person in line for the presidency was the president pro tem of the senate who voted to remove johnson from office. who had a very strong vested interest in that process. and so it's not just -- or hypothetical. it can be impeachment. but also let's just get back to a kills point. you can have a four years with the political will of the country by moving from somebody at one end of the political spectrum to someone radically at the other end. it's really worth thinking through whether that is an appropriate way to have succession. and add to that, in our temporary politics, the speaker of the house and a leader of the

senate, even if it were the majority leader are not sort of consensual figures in the country that naturally unified people, because they are strong leaders like nancy pelosi, they are really quite controversial figures, oftentimes with a negative rating in the broader public partly because they are pushing at a particular party program, an agenda, and therefore have a lot of opposition. if it were a period, divided party government, i think there would be no legitimacy attached to succession to power by a speaker of the other party. it would seem more like a two. >> but what about contra to that, what about a succession by

secretary of the treasury or even an attorney general who is totally unknown in the country? you're talking about legitimacy now. someone the people out in the country barely could even name and in many cases might not be able to name. is that who you want leading the country at a time of crisis? >> you know, ironically the secretary of state and secretary of treasury now are better known than the majority leader of the senate. >> but that's only because of the current economic crisis. i would suggest to you that in a normal time, no one -- very few people would be able to invite with the secretary of the treasure is. a lot of people wouldn't even know who the attorney general of the united states is. >> all right. do we have any questions here ask please. >> i think the discussion has been an outstanding discussion.

just i'll go very quickly. i like sony people in the legal profession have been on many commissions and chaired a number and almost 50 years of it. and i guess i reflect the philosophy of a very dear friend of mine who said how important it is to american democracy that there be groups like you that keep alive important subjects and put out what you think is right. and american democracy functions incrementally. and the fact that you are out there and your successes might be out there, ideas, in time a number of these ideas might become more of a political

reality. so the importance of what you do cannot be deemphasize. >> i know the frustrations of jerry serving as on the commission or i would use a keypad at. but i, having said that, why some incremental steps couldn't be taken. made reference, congressman. jamie, you talked about whether the acting secretary should be in or out. there shouldn't be any question about that. they are either in or out. i think there's a consensus that could be developed there. and in some of these other areas about looking at the party rules, making sure that they are where they should be. however, and then there were suggestions, on this whole

inauguration period. so if you can get some of the incremental things done, that might set the bases, maybe not the same time, but a little bit down the line for some more steps. because people are thinking, you know, this is right to do to protect the safety and security of our country. i just throw that out. >> if i could react to that. in theory you're correct. i mean, it would be nice to be able to take, let's solve this problem, let's solve that problem. my guess is you're only going to get one bite at the apple here, and that if you ever get congress to pay attention to this and you haven't yet, you better get him to deal with this as much as possible at that one time. >> discovery institute. to suggestions, this is a

discussion you might consider and i would be interested in your comment. instead of an arbitrary order of the cabinet department, why not let each president be required by congress to pass the law, to designate before being sworn and while president-elect, the order of succession. but everybody, including the big four. because for example with this administration i would hope that general sasaki would be right near the top and even against the attorney general or mr. geithner. any other thing is, it's appalling how long it's taking to get the government in place. one way to finesse the confirmation issue without congress surrendering ultimate power is that the president's appointments, at least the senior officer in each department, i think it should be done for the juniors as well, takes office subject to confirmation within 100 days by the congress. so the president starts, and he

has full cabinet, or she has a full cabinet on day one, designates that succession adherence to ford and if it turns out someone didn't pay their taxes or didn't hire, reporter nanny or something and then the president will appoint someone else. >> i don't actually like that latter suggestion at all. we don't have much in the way of delay any more for actual cabinet members. and if you gave him an additional 100 days, they would take it. and serving in an unconfirmed status and having to make hard decisions not confirmed is not a good way to be a leader. you would trim your sails too much, you would be worried about the confirmation process. we did in the 9/11 commission report make recommendations, many of which norms that have been acted upon. to cut down the period in which

the subcabinet leadership in addition to the cabinet leadership is subject to confirmation. but at the cabinet level, i think the issue actually has more or less than salt. >> i like one of your recommendations about maybe getting each president the opportunity to order his or her own line of succession, the agi thing can set their own line of succession and sometimes include u.s. attorneys from obviously throughout the country which builds on the point about being outside of dc. my one question about your proposal would be whether it's constitutional. i don't have a reason right now but article to talk about congress by law shall provide for the line of succession. so the question is could congress pass a law delegating that to the president, that would be a question i think we need to take a look at. if it works out i think it's an interesting idea. >> i think probably the way to do that is before the end on

girl, the president makes a recommendation for a line of succession and then congress can pass along ratifying it. there is some real merit to that. part of the reason being that you may find a secretary of veterans affairs who is supremely qualified. i could go back to the secretaries of veterans affairs over the last period since we created the department and take many who were not chosen because they had the breadth of experience, depth and knowledge. and that is true of many cabinet nevers and that is one reason why we wanted to move just to the top four. but i'm perfectly happy to let the president designate six or however many. as long as we add in some people who are outside washington. having all the cabinet, given what we know about the way cabinet officers are chosen, there are criteria that every president-elect our president will have. they are regional criteria. they are political criteria.

they aren't gender and other ethnic criteria that may have nothing to do with whether you got somebody who has that coming into the white house. so rethinking this process all little bit, even if you don't like a lot of the ideas that we have, is important and worth doing and it can be done by legislation. just on the second point. there remains a big problem with the nomination and confirmation process. there is an enormous blog here. the way the process is set up, you have way too many people who have to get full fbi driven security clearances, 1141 senate confirmable president nominees. it narrows a pipeline and you have a huge flood of people coming in. and what it means is that months into a new administration, this was true on 9/11 by the way,

large numbers of people at that subcabinet level. people unita operationalized much of your policy had not been confirmed. that has got to change. and there also we need strong leadership from congress, part of it may be reducing the number of presidential appointees, and certainly reducing the number of senate confirmable once. these are not easy to do for the obvious recent. >> jim. >> i just wanted to point out the two main, the two arguments that have been made over and over again about removing the professional leaders from the line of succession. one, political intrigue. and two, that these tend to be controversial figures. both of these arguments apply equally to the new federal officials you are talking about. whether its governors or former president or vice president, you have the