Thursday, December 11, 2008

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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The Krait Plumbs The Illinois Electorate: Forget Dumb, Blago Has A Reformer's Hair

In today's NY Fishwrap, The Krait (Gail Collins is just as poisonous as her Op-Ed nest-mate — Maureen Dowd, aka The Cobra.) sinks her fangs into the Illinois wackiness that is the disintegration of Governor Milorad "Rod" R. Blagojevich. The Krait is LOL funny throughout today's piece. If this is (fair & balanced) diversion from bad times, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Good News From Illinois
By Gsil Collins

These are troubled times when people yearn for diversion. We like stories about a simple crisis in which somebody does something incredibly stupid that will not cost 100,000 people their jobs. Yet Hollywood starlets and pop singers have been unhelpfully quiet. Then, suddenly, there was Rod Blagojevich seeking bids for Barack Obama’s Senate seat with all the subtlety of a tobacco auctioneer.

That’s the ticket! Now, if only we could indict the economy ...

Feel free to indulge in a little schadenfreude at the expense of the governor of Illinois. Sure, the last couple of months have been tough. But at least you didn’t have to spend your birthday listening to the nation debate whether you were the most corrupt elected official in living memory or simply out of your mind.

Some people might wonder why Blagojevich chose to say potentially incriminating things like “I want to make money” over the telephone at a time when he knew he was the subject of multiple federal investigations. Perhaps his legal problems sent him off into his own little world. There he was, sitting around the house in his blue jogging suit, dipping into delusions of grandeur in which the empty Senate seat becomes a magic key to a Cabinet post, a big-money job for the missus, the presidency in 2016.

Lord knows we’ve all been tempted to retreat into fantasyland when things get rough. Really, the only thing saving us from succumbing was the lack of a Senate seat to sell.

Those of us who do not live in Illinois had generally not given much thought to Rod Blagojevich until this week. We had never wondered how a person with a 13 percent approval rating ever managed to get elected in the first place, though now I am personally leaning toward the theory that it was the hair. Blagojevich tossed his thick brown mane and the voters told each other: “Yes, he sounds a little dumb. But truly, this is the hair of a reformer.”

Illinois is not the only place going through empty-Senate-seat turmoil. In New York, the departure of Hillary Clinton for the Cabinet has set off an unseemly scramble, the like of which you usually see only when someone drops a pound of hamburger in the middle of a pit bull convention.

Still, as far as we know, nobody has actually tried to trade anything other than political advantage, the hope of future campaign contributions and the gratitude of one or more special interest groups. You know, the normal stuff. On behalf of my state, I would like to thank the governor of Illinois for making us feel as if this is a good record.

The Senate seat sellathon is actually not the most damaging thing Blagojevich is accused of trying to do. There are, after all, 100 senators, and we know from several centuries of experience that the nation can survive quite nicely even if a sizable minority are brain-dead bank robbers.

Worse, he’s upped the already hearty level of cynicism in Illinois voters. He ran for governor as an antidote to the culture that had sent an average of one Illinois chief executive to the clink every 10 years. (“Our state has been adrift. Corruption has replaced leadership,” Rod and his hair said in early campaign commercials.) Now look at him. It’s the sort of experience that sets the public wondering if there’s a way to get reform while avoiding reformers.

In New York, of course, we elected a reform governor two years ago, and he was driven from office by some unpleasantness involving the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. escort service. Now, post-Rod, all that seems kind of petty — especially since, as far as we know, Eliot Spitzer even used his own money.

That’s something else we have to hold against Blagojevich. He’s definitely driven the bar of acceptable political behavior below sea level.

Look at Delaware, where the election left yet another Senate seat vacant and Gov. Ruth Ann Minner quickly announced that she’d be appointing Joe Biden’s longtime aide, Edward Kaufman, to the job. Given the fact that Biden wants his seat to eventually go to his son, Beau, who is currently serving in Iraq with the Army National Guard, some observers found it a tad convenient that Minner happened to choose a person no one has ever heard of who is intensely loyal to the Biden family and has already promised not to run in the next election.

But now Delaware is looking like the gold standard. It was only political expediency! The State Legislature isn’t going to have to set up an emergency election so the governor won’t have time to barter the seat away. And everybody in Washington knows the aides do all the real work anyway so nobody will even notice Biden is gone. Good work, Governor Minner!

One thing is clear. We cannot have any more vacant Senate seats hanging around, creating temptation. Next time we have a presidential election, let’s try to limit the candidates to governors, retired generals and failed movie stars. Much safer.

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007. Besides America's Women, which was published in 2003, Ms. Collins is the author of Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, and The Millennium Book, which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins. Her new book is about American women since 1960. Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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