Quote:
Originally Posted by dragoon500ly
Situation gets even worse! According to the PSA, you not only have the Big 4; pres, vice pres; pres pro tempore and speaker of the House, you also have each cabinet sec, their assistant and their deputies, taking the succession up to 46, just a Federal level! PSA also includes the state governors, vice govs, and the heads of both houses of the state leg, which adds another 199 (Nebraska has a single house leg), so that's 245 people in the legitimate line of succession, which blows canon right out of the water!
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But having President pro tempore and Speaker of the House in the succession is unconstitutional, since the Incompatibility Clause (Article I, Section 6, Clause 2) states that no Senator or Representative may be appointed to another office during their term. The way the succession acts try to get around that is to state that taking the oath of office shall be held to be a resignation of the prior office, but I could easily see someone with a black-and-white view of things taking the stance that they can't be appointed in the first place, and refusing to go along with the appointment of either of the legislative successors.
There's also the controversy of "bumping." The PSA allows for a "higher-ranking" position to take over from a "lower-ranking" one. For example, the Secretary of Labor becomes President. New congressional elections are held, and the new Speaker of the House bumps the President and becomes the new President, because s/he's higher in succession than the Secretary of Labor. This violates Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 of the Constitution, which states that an Officer shall hold their position until disabled or a new President is
elected.
Both of these problems step into the morass of separation of powers; they create situations where the legislative controls the executive or is able to wield undue influence on the executive, and could be seen as justification for discarding the entire law.
State legislators are not eligible in the PSA and never have been; they are ignored by 3 US Code 19. The order is Speaker, President pro tempore, and cabinet secretaries in order of their department seniority (State first, either Veterans Affairs or Homeland Security last depending on whether it's classic T2K or current timeline T2K17). It's a matter of debate whether deputies or "acting" secretaries are eligible, since they were not confirmed
as Secretary by Congress. They definitely were NOT eligible until 2006, when the language changed (the 1886 Act stated Officers had to be approved by the Senate to hold the office that formed the basis of their claim to the Presidency, while the 2006 Act shuffled words around so that Officers have to have been approved by the Senate to hold an office). Acting secretaries have claimed to have been added to the succession, but it's never been announced and its legality has never been examined by a court.