Is something radically wrong with the current rules governing succession?
Although we might never have been jogged into thinking we had a problem if it weren’t for 9/11, it’s clear that throughout the history of the American republic we’ve gone through gaps in time when there’s been a real lack of governing continuity and it’s often taken a crisis to move us enough to try to fix them. Take just one example: Woodrow Wilson ended up comatose for many months at the end of his presidency. We know now from ample documentation that during this period his wife ran the country because there was nothing in the constitution to deal with presidential incapacitation. We didn’t get around to fixing that problem until the 26th amendment was ratified following the Kennedy assassination. At other times following presidential assassinations or when a president has died in office of natural causes, we’ve gone through periods when, because the vice president has succeeded the president, we had no vice president in office. The fact is, we don’t have a real history of doing thin
