Eliminating The Lamest (-Brained) Duck In Our History

One of the talking heads, regularly viewed by this blogger, is Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball With Chris Matthews." As the malaise deepened in the Land O'The Free and The Home O'The Brave, Matthews has taken up the cry that The Hopester "needs to do something." Short of surrounding the White House with tanks, The Hopester must wait until January 20, 2009, before taking names and kicking butts. However, there is another way. From the shores of Wisconsin's Lake Mendota, one of Clio's disciples — Professor John M. Cooper — offers the lesson of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, who did not want to be a lame duck. Ironically, Wilson — after a disastrous stroke in 1919 — did leave office in 1921 as the lamest duck of all (in a wheelchair). However, in 1916, Wilson envisioned a loss to the Republican, Charles Evans Hughes. Wilson's plan for transition would see the appointment of Hughes as Secretary of State after Robert Lansing's resignation, followed by the resignations of Wilson and VP Thomas Marshall, and the succession of Hughes to the presidency without a lame duck period. The plan was never implemented because Wilson edged Hughes by a narrow margin. When Warren G. Harding (R-OH) was elected in 1920, the incapacitated Wilson either forgot his transition plan of 1916 or decided that Warren G. Harding was no Charles E. Hughes because the lame duck Wilson sat out his term in a wheelchair. So, if the Wilson transition plan of 1916 were played out today, there would be three resignations beginning with Kinda-Lies-A-Lot (followed by the appointment of The Hopester as Secretary of State). Then, The Dubster and The Dickster would resign to vacate the Top 3 administrative postions in the line of presidential succession. Following the administrative branch resignations, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), followed by Senate President pro termpore Robert Byrd (D-WV) would need to resign as POTUS as well. (The Speaker of the House and the Senate President pro tem entered the mix to supercede the Secretary of State with the Presidential Succession Act of 1947.) Then, and only then, The Hopester — as Secretary of State in this bizarre scenario — would take the reins of the presidency and end this dreadful transition to the joyful reporting of Chris Matthews. If this is (fair & balanced) resignation to surrealism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Pause That Depresses
By John Milton Cooper Jr.

The three-month “interregnum” between Barack Obama’s election and George W. Bush’s last day in office makes one long for a parliamentary system, where the defeated prime minister leaves and his successor takes over at once. As the country faces the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, you might think that it’s too bad it can’t happen here — but once it almost did, during another time of crisis.

In 1916, with the United States on the brink of entering World War I, Woodrow Wilson seemed likely to lose his bid for re-election. Despite a spectacular record of domestic legislation (establishing the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission and a graduated income tax, among other successes), the president was bound by the hard facts of political geography.

In those days, Wilson’s Democratic Party held the South and the interior West, but the Republicans controlled the Northeast and Midwest — which supplied them with a reliable majority in the Electoral College and control of Congress. The election that year was eerily similar to the 2000 race, with everything hanging on a recount in a single swing state, California. The result remained in doubt for nearly two weeks.

The precarious state of relations with the nations at war in Europe, particularly Germany, made Wilson fear for national security in the event of an interregnum — which then, before the ratification of the 20th Amendment in 1933, lasted more than a month longer than it does today. A former professor of political science who had studied and admired parliamentary systems, Wilson decided upon a drastic plan to shorten this uneasy period.

Two days before the election he had a sealed letter, which he had typed himself, hand-delivered to the secretary of state, who was then third in line of succession to the presidency. Wilson wrote that if he lost he would immediately appoint his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, secretary of state, and then he and his vice president would resign, making Hughes president at once. Wilson said he was proposing this plan because those were not “ordinary times” and “no such critical circumstances in regard to our foreign policy have ever existed before.”

But Wilson won California, by just 3,806 votes, and he stayed in office to lead the United States into World War I and make peace afterward. His plan for a shortened interregnum never saw the light of day.

The only other people who even knew what he’d proposed were his wife and the secretary of state, Robert Lansing, who first revealed it in his posthumously published memoirs in 1935. The revelation came too late to save the country from what has been called “the interregnum of despair” between Franklin Roosevelt’s election in November 1932 and Herbert Hoover’s departure from office on March 4, 1933. Hoover had served under Wilson and admired him, and he might have adopted this plan if he had known about it.

Our current interregnum and its predecessor in 1933 have not been the only peril-filled transfers of power in our history — 1861 was the scariest of them all — and there ought to be a way to avoid or at least shorten such anxious passages. It is worth asking whether Woodrow Wilson’s idea could be wisely applied now.

The present law of succession appears to rule it out because the speaker of the House, not the secretary of state, is now third in line. But this line of succession is not graven in stone, much less embedded in the Constitution. Congress has changed it several times, most notably at the end of World War II, when the succession shifted to include more elected officials, but as recently as 2005, when Congress designated the secretary of homeland security as 18th in line. In fact, it is not even necessary to change the order, only to add a provision — a version of Wilson’s plan — allowing a president to resign after a successor is elected and have that successor take office immediately.

There’s no risk this would become standard practice, because outgoing presidents rarely want to leave before their terms expire. But we still need a procedure for the quicker transition of power in troubled times like these.

[John Milton Cooper, Jr., is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has held Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships and served as a Fulbright Professor at Moscow University. His previous books include The Warrior and the Priest (1985) and Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920 (1992). Cooper attended Princeton University (A.B.,summa cum laude) and Columbia University (M.A. and Ph.D.). Currently, Cooper is writing a biography of Woodrow Wilson.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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