but have come into sharper focus because of that tragic event in american history. another tragedy, the assassination of president kennedy also showed flaws in the system. forward with the adoption of the 25th amendment. looking broadly at our system of presidential succession, i believe our constitutional and statutory provisions have done a good job in protecting the american people in times of succession crises. but we need to constantly studied them to make sure that they are as good as they can be. the federalist said that a primary end of civil society is the safety and security of the people. without which our liberties are enabled to forge. our system of presidential succession, i suggest, has served us well in providing such safety and security. it has enabled us to move forward even in the most dramatic of circumstances, such as the death of a president or

resignations of an elected president and vice president. what should we expect of a system of presidential succession that might be asked. some features important to me are providing stability and order in the transition of power, along for the continuity of government and respecting in its functioning constitutional principles. the people must understand this system and have confidence in its elements and application. the report issued today is impressive in scope and detail. in a relatively brief document it provides an important overview of the history and provisioned on presidential succession. it identifies major problems and proposes reasonable, if not some respects, creative measures to address these problems. i make these comments and offer these observations concerning the recommendations contained in this report. the removal of the legislative leaders from the line of

succession as a policy matter is long overdue, in my humble opinion. the principal reason, as i see it, is not because they can't do the job, but to assure continuity of policy and administration at a time of crisis. a quick shift in party control of the government as of the report notes is not likely to promote stability and order. there exists as well legal issues, and you heard about those issues from professor akhil amar. and the contemplation of the constitution. and therefore eligible for succession roles. given a long history with the legislative leaders being in the light of succession, however, i would accept these legal risk if i thought the policy reasons were not compelling, because i do. this is because the constitution is not without its ambiguities in the analysis of the officer questioned. and i also note intentionally at

the time the constitution was adopted, the idea of a legislative officer, and i put a quote around officer, coming to the center of power after the removal of a governor and lieutenant governor or deputy governor, if one were to look at succession in the colonies, or look at succession as reflected in the early state constitutions with respect to those states that elected governors. you would see that the legislative person emerging after the demise of the governor, if that be the case, or the deputy governor if that be the case, was not out of the understanding of the framework of the constitution. i just know that intentionally, but as i say, i think the thrust of this report and the emphasis

of mr. amar data policy in and of itself, i think strongly urge urges for the adoption of the recommendations set forth in this report. the idea of adding to the line of succession, though so outside of washington, has merit and appeal. as i noted in my own writing 45 years ago. i wonder, however, it is wise to reduce the number of cabinet members in line to the fore as suggested in the report. i suggest that the various scenarios in the report make a case for a longer line of succession, and therefore the continuation of all the cabinet members in the line of succession. this would be in keeping with history, and consistent with the use of the entire cabinet in the determination of presidential inability under the 25th amendment. the recommendation of the report

is certainly correct, that the 1947 statute needs to be clarified as to whether or not acting secretaries are included in the line of succession, assuming the current line is maintained. i can go either way on this one, influence in part by reaching the 25th minute of including an acting secretaries where there might not be ahead of the department in the determination of presidential inability. i note also in your report that acting secretaries may be serving as head of the departments in the free inauguration period, a period of particular vulnerability as the keynote speaker today no doubt that this make even more important the recommendations of the report as to facilitate the appointment of the new cabinet. to make clear the removal of the acting secretaries of coverage under the succession act of 1947, and not deal with the pre-inauguration days of the inauguration period along the

lines of this report could be imprudent. reducing a time period between the casting of electoral votes and a formal declaration by congress appears right, but i have two observations. isn't necessary to have more than a few days between the two events in order to handle any resulting court litigation that would flow from the votes of electives. and shouldn't wait while we are at a reform of the electoral college area do much more about the electoral college system which can produce popular vote losers, tolerate electorate defections and sanctioned a choice by congress under an antique, one state, one vote formula. of course, i realize that the mandate of the commission may not reach that far. the recommendation of a special election is intriguing, but raises questions for further consideration. such as whether an election in

five months under an electoral college and political party system would actually work. it's too soon, and stabilize it enough given that once that election is over another election cycle would begin. the ford rockefeller selections in the worst possible circumstances in american history worked well in providing stability and continuity. basically i'm suggesting that where there is no president and vice president within the first two years of a presidential term, leaving the system exactly where it is at the present time rather than moving toward a system of a special presidential election. but if one were to move toward a system of a special presidential election at that point, there is an issue, maybe a constitutional issue, certainly those in 1886 that put as a cabinet in the succession law thought there was

an issue as a duration of a president's term flowing from such a special election. the members of congress that debated the cabinet line of succession and put it in the succession law in 1886 removing the president pro tem and speaker from the then law of 1792 thought that a special election would have to respect the four year term of the constitution. i just would note that issue, but i think the recommendation is an interesting recommendati recommendation. it should be out there, as it will be, for discussion and consideration, but i do think there are a lot of issues with that particular question of whether or not to have a special election. i find interesting the recommendations contained in the report on presidential

incapacity. the suggestion of using the other provisions of section four of the 25th amendment as a contingency of swords, if the cabinet were unavailable through death or incapacity, appears to me at least to allow for the existence of the two bodies existing at the same time. even though different purposes. i reserve my own judgment on that one as to consistency with the language and history of the other body provision of the 25th amendment. the report is correct to note, however, that the other by provision of section four of the amendment allows for the replacement of the cabinet as determining body in the case of inability. the suggestion of congress providing guidance to lower officials in the line of succession to have to deal with an issue of presidential inability is understandable. but i am not sure how far

congress can go under the provisions of article two and the 20th amendment that allowed for the appointments of offices to serve in the line of succession. they will have their responsibility, their judgment, and how much congress can surround that with guidance, i think raises questions that need to be discussed and focused on. finally, the recommendations in this report concerning fixing the pre-election that time period i agree with and command. and that's it. i look forward to continuing these discussions with you. thank you. [applause] >> did you want to mention the anniversary that you noted to me as well? john has a historical.

>> well, professor amar made reference to garfield and arthur. i believe that today is the anniversary of the shooting of, you have to check on that, it's either july 1 or july 2, 1881 of garfield in union station. and it's just a historical note. >> jim mann. >> thanks very much. i'm in a little different position. i'm a journalist and author. and in a funny position because the main problem that can cause me to write about presidential succession is addressed by the very issuance of this report, and in that sense is taken care of as i will later explain. and yet i'm also here to warn about some of the solutions that the report comes up with, which i think have some problems. i'll say, you know, as a

journalist and author, the issue of succession comes up year in and year out in funny ways. this is not just with a cabinet member who is absent from the state of the union address. and the one that brought it home to me, just over 10 years ago, i was a correspondent interested in asia about to go with president clinton on a trip to asia at the end of 1998. and at the last minute president clinton didn't go because he stayed back to take some military action against iraq, actually. we are talking about a militant under military action of a couple days, not six years. vice president gore went instead. and the same five or six reporters who were going to go on air force one with president clinton went with vice president gore, who welcomed us to the plane and began showing us

around the plane with great relish. . . while many other members flown on air force one with president clinton, the vice president was never allowed to for reasons of continuity in government. i can climb to be the one of the only people to have flown on air force one with vice-president al gore. i got into this serious issue one riding my book. i was looking at the careers of all of those senior members of the george w. bush administration and was appointed by several people, who remembered both vice-president cheney and brahms felda in those

jobs in a program that they took part in in the 1980's. this was during a peak of cold war tensions with the soviet union. the issue was what would happen if there was a soviet attack on the united states in which several top officers were killed? the response of the reagan administration was to set up a secret program with elaborate exercises in which three different teams were in established. they ran drills, teams of 30 to 45 career officials who would know how to run the government. they appointed several people who knew how the federal government ran and then it would take a cabinet member. it could be someone like

secretary of agriculture for example, someone that did not know national security. but the person that would really know how to run the show would be a former white house chief of staff, so both dick cheney and don rooms thought were part of -- exercises chiefs of staffs participated in these exercises and still relevant to some of the issues i'll talk about is they would go to different places each time. sometimes abandoned school yards. why? they did that because the earlier responses of the 1950s had been to create these famous bunkers outside washington in virginia, mount whether. and by the 1980s, 30 years later, the fear was nuclear weapons could damage or somehow get to these fixed facilities. so the idea was mobility, surprise and so on.

and as i looked into this -- i wrote about this at some length. and the thing that bothered me the most was that there was no constitutional or legal basis for this. congress was not part of it. this is not a procedure that congress set up. congress was taken out of the -- out of the legal line of succession. this was a procedure that was set up entirely from within the executive branch of government without ever checking with congress. and, you know, when i say this process of the commission and its recommendations is important and to be congratulated, it's because this is -- you are and hopefully are working with

congress on actually addressing a procedure rather than simply having one which is set up without congressional authorization from within an executive branch. i mean, the program of the '80s was actually not the creation so much of president reagan himself but of the nsc bureaucracy. vice president bush played a role but the lead operations officer on this was someone named oliver north. that would be the guy who later went on to be in charge of iran contra. you all are addressing this. you are making this -- you're giving consideration to the issues in a public way, and that to me is all to the good. when i look at the report, i find my own reaction is to find some important problems that are addressed in important ways --

very specific problems that i find are addressed well. as you suggest, you want to get the president pro tem out of the line of succession. the idea that a senator who has a job by virtue of his age should be in the line of succession is something that should be fixed and fixed as soon as possible. we call this the strom thurmond provision if you want. but one way or another, that's all to the good. your recommendations on the inaugural are good. your recommendations on changing the strange procedure of bumping where one person can, you know -- where one person in the line of succession can bump

another as people recover from problems and so on. that's all to the good. i want to reserve judgment on one ofour most important recommendations, which is to get congress out of the line of succession. i haven't really thought that through enough. i have some reservations about that because i'm not sure it's necessary. you are making good points. i will say as a constitutional matter, there seems to be some confusion as to what the constitutional issues are. the framers of the constitution were not worried about a change in parties. because, you know, they didn't exist at the time. so it's not -- that's not -- that's a policy question. that's not a constitutional question. and i don't know -- i'm not persuaded of the need to do that, but i think you are making good arguments on that.

i want to turn for the last few minutes to the single provision which i have the greatest problems with. and that's the provisions to set up new officers outside of washington in the line of succession. because i do have -- i think that creates new problems and that the problems it's meant to address could be fixed in other ways. so let's look at this. the suggestion is that there be several four or whatever new positions created, either of former senior federal officials or perhaps governors who would be in the line of succession. and that they would be ahead of existing cabinet members of all but the top four existing cabinet members.

well, let's look at some of the people being suggested. first of all, governors -- i can't help by start what if the governors in argentina -- but, you know, how are we going to choose which states the governors are from, small states would be against big-state governors. who chooses them? governors themselves have political ambitions. you talk about the political ambitions of a speaker of the house, for example, many governors are interested in running for president in the future and, in fact, i would say -- i would remind you that governors are well represented -- former governors are represented in the cabinet often including in this administration. i mean, the sorts of people who might be chosen as governors in

these -- for these special jobs now are precisely the kinds of people who are in the canet. jan janet napolitano, kathleen sebelius. former officials, well, that sounds nicer than i think it might turn out to be. i'm reluctant to give former presidents and former vice presidents an ambiguous new role in the national security apparatus. i think we've got a system that works just great the way it is. we have former presidents and vice presidents taking on the roles that they choose but without -- if it's a vice president, a former vice president might be interested running for president again, but one way or another, i have trouble seeing does the president of the united

states -- he's the person who's going to choose these -- the people in these jobs. does he choose someone who might be a rival? does he not? let's take history of the last three or four months. i'm among the people who think that vice president -- former vice president cheney or jimmy carter or any president or vice president has the right to say what he wants, express his views in public. that, you know, there's no obligation to shut up. but we're now going to give people access to new security information on which they can say my reading of the national security is that the new administration has weakened national security, i just see a lot of problems there. the president -- the new president who chooses the people for these positions is himself faced with a dilemma, okay, so if we're going to have four new

federal officials in the line of succession, above most of the cabinet members, first of all, this downgrades the existing cabinet members. do you choose someone in line for a top federal job to run a cabinet position or maybe they'd rather stay in the home state and be sixth in the line of succession. and above all, i'm not sure i see the need for this. we have a system now which is carried out as fran townsend has said -- there are procedures that take -- that are in operation at the time of the state of the union, inauguration, other times, where a cabinet member is out of town. we can have a cabinet member out of town nearly permanently. you know, just one at a time.

you know, the cabinet members might like that, a requirement that, you know, one week out of 8 or 10 during the year, they're required to work out of town. it's certainly workable anyway. >> buenas aries. >> well -- and, you know, they can claim that they're checking the, you know, sentiments outside of washington. i just don't see why sting up four or so new federal jobs -- to me it creates more problems than it fixes. so to me, i would extend the existing procedures for -- with the existing line of succession rather than create new jobs within the line of succession. thanks.

>> thank you. thank you to all the panelists. as you can see, we didn't make this panel to be a panel of people who are officially associated with the commission to endorse every recommendation. in fact, i hear some of the arguments that we had internally on the commission. there are some weighing of things on each of these issues if you push in one direction maybe you move in the other direction. you know, i think the commissioned some answers to these things and wanted to move in certain directions. just one point on one of the recommendations that jim mentioned on the last point about the cabinet members or the new positions outside of washington. we do recommend that the president appoint these people so it wouldn't be a precedent on the oldest state or the newest state but those are very reasonable arguments against that.

i'm going to open this up and hope the panelists will talk amongst themselves. if any of you want to react to each other's comments and i'm going to open it up to the general audience. >> just a couple of quick thoughts. i agree that the framers of the constitution, of the original constitution, weren't quite focused on party continuity. james madison thought there were additional -- there were all sorts of constitutional arguments above and beyond party continuity of presidential succession. but i do want to say the additional concern about party continuity isn't just the policy concern. it is a constitutional concern even if it wasn't part of the original constitution's concern. the twelfth amendment -- it's part of our constitution and it's about -- it ratifies an idea of national presidential parties. the 25th amendment seems to me

to be an amendment very much embarrae embrace embracing a party model. these these are constitutional considerations in addition to the policy considerations even if james madison wasn't talking about them and didn't even need them to make the case in my view a very pervasive case that he made in 1790. the second and only other point i want to make about having some people outside washington, baseball purists still have not reconciled themselves to the designated hitter, but i think you can think about these people outside of d.c. as a designated hitter model. one person might -- their only job will be a base runner in the closing innings to deal with

left-handed batters in the last inning. the reason that i think maybe former presidents four former secretaries of state might suitably be appropriate people to be nominated by a president to be these contingent people outside of washington d.c., when you have a double death or disability, we are in an extreme situation, a situation that america has never undergone before you have to imagine psychologically the situation. any comfort that you can convey to the american people, to world leaders, to the markets, i think it would be good. someone has done it before who has already served as president or secretary of state could be and knows what it is to be president really could be a perfectes