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Bryson Crash Reveals Threat of Headless Government
Hugh Pickens writes "According to Business Week, the traffic accident that left U.S. Commerce Secretary John Bryson unconscious and alone in his bashed-up Lexus on June 9 raises questions about why the 10th official in line to succeed the president was left so vulnerable. It also highlights potential gaps in security for senior U.S. government officials, who receive varying levels of protection. 'They lost track of him,' says James Carafano, a terrorism scholar at the Heritage Foundation. 'Post 9/11, that's a bit of a head scratcher.' Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who are high in the line of succession and have national-security responsibilities, are provided protection 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but other federal officials, even in cabinet-level positions or other top posts, often travel without the security details that even a big-city mayor or state governor would be provided. Threats to cabinet-level officials aren't overblown, says Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who has urged that the government revamp its succession plans and says a nuclear bomb hidden in a suitcase detonated in Washington could leave a headless government. 'The lack of interest in continuity may stem from the same reasons some smart people refuse to create wills, even though failure to do so leaves behind horrific messes for their loved ones,' writes Ornstein. 'Yet the threat is real. Our leaders' failure to establish plans to ensure that our Constitution survives is irresponsible.'"
Ya really. Aside from cabinet officials, you then have members of both legislative houses, theoretically the courts etc. Even the military.
It's not like leadership wouldn't emerge, and if enough top level people just got killed you're mostly banking on whomever takes over to actually go ahead and still have future elections and so on, regardless of how exactly succession officially works.
If you start spending huge amounts of money protecting every member of congress, every member of the senate, every senior cabinet member every assistant cabinet secretary, the courts, and then all of their immediate families etc. etc. etc. you're starting to look at billions of spending, and you start getting into serious questions about their ability to live lives relatively normally in fear of rare events.
Sure a nuclear bomb blowing up a capital city (london paris washington etc.) would be more than a little problematic, but in that situation you can't even assume that the 2nd person in line to the throne/presidency is going to still have their mental faculties even if they are otherwise alive and physically uninjured. In that case someone will have to improvise leadership until order can be restored, assuming such a concept is even still relevant.
We have a ridiculously long line of succession that we shouldn't be worried.
President
VP
Speaker of the House
President Pro Tem of the Senate
15 cabinet secretaries, starting with the Secretary of State
Really, you just need to protect the top 3-4, unless there's a particular threat to another one (Clinton as SoS gets special protection as a former first lady, for example). It would be nearly impossible to knock out the first 20. And if they did, the House would immediately elect a new Speaker, who would be elevated to president by being speaker. So really after that you get all the ranking members of the majority party. It's not worth worrying about.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
There is a hardened bunker under the whitehouse. That's not exactly secret, but there are numerous others. There's a major centre in Pennsylvania, NORAD command etc.
The raven rock facility (in Pennsylvania but on the border with maryland) was revealed in 2004 as where cheney spent most of the latter bit of 2001 hiding out. Blame (sort of) time magazine for that one. I'm not sure it was actually much of a secret where the facility was.
Biden actually disclosed that there's a bunker in the vice presidents house in D.C. Which again, isn't a huge surprise. You'd have expected there to be bunkers of varying quality in official housing, and on various military bases and command and control centres.