The solution put forward by the Continuity of Government Commission was to remove members of Congress and all but the most senior cabinet secretaries from the line of succession, then to add a few specially designated successors at the end of the line.
WASHINGTON: Among the many political shortcomings that the pandemic has laid bare is that the U.S. suffers from constitutional and statutory gaps that make its democracy, and even its basic governing ability, vulnerable in an emergency.
The good news? The hard thinking about this problem has mostly already been done. The bad news? No one who can do anything about it seems to care - and the incentives for undertaking the needed reforms are slim indeed.
The last time the U.S. perceived a major threat to the functioning of the republic was after the Sept. 11 attacks. It didn’t take much to realize that the nation was vulnerable; in fact, the post-9/11 culture rapidly produced fictional scenarios in which some obscure cabinet secretary ended up in the Oval Office after a crisis, or devious politicians manipulated the existing and poorly designed order of presidential succession.
If people cared more about Congress, there would’ve been just as many doomsday stories centered on the legislature, which is similarly ill-prepared.
In response, two Washington think tanks put together an all-star commission to study how to safeguard the government in a crisis. It duly published its reports, and then ... nothing.
The government remains as vulnerable now as it was in 2001. Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of long-term planning that individual politicians have few incentives to engage in, aside from patriotism or a sense of responsibility.
Long-term planning is always a problem in democracies. No one will reward the officials who stockpile ventilators and masks for years before they’re needed. In fact, politicians who invest in overflow capacity may wind up facing criticism for wasting precious resources.
But at least tangible items like ventilators might be readily defended; not one in a million voters is going to care about the mechanisms for keeping the government running in an emergency until it’s too late.
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