Something awesome, something that's outright treason.

[grinninfoole]

If you like either fun or musicals, you should check out Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, aka Joss Whedon, Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion screwing around during the writers' strike.  Episode One (of Three) has been posted just now.

On a more serious note, and wow this should have been the top news story for months now, Slate has posted an article discussing the real possibility that the Bush administration has drafted a secret Executive Order to bypass the line of presidential succession if the President and Vice-President both die.  Which would be the textbook example of a high crime and/or misdemeanor, if they wrote text books for committing such acts.

Comments

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

At this point, I wouldn't put anything past the Bush administration, but I think this is probably not as sinister as the article paints it.

When Reagan did something similar, the eventuality pictured was when where a nuclear attack had occurred and the entire Presidential line of succession was wiped out. What he was doing was not explicitly adding someone to the line of Presidential succession: he was delegating Presidential authority over the military (specifically, the authority to order nuclear launches), relying on precedent going back to the Eisenhower administration. Every President since Eisenhower had made similar contingency plans, but they were informal. Reagan was the first one to formalize it, and it was classified so that an attacker wouldn't add the official designated for the delegated powers to the list of people who needed to have a few megatons headed their way. I do not know if this kind of delegation was continued after the end of the Cold War.

The Bush administration has already shown itself to be out of control in so many ways, so I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out they've expanded on this and actually done what Reagan was accused of doing. But I think it far more likely that they've simply revived the procedure (if it went into abeyance when the Soviet Union went out of business) and are getting into trouble because of their usual secrecy fetish. It would make sense to keep the identities of officials who might have the power delegated to them classified (it'd probably be TOP SECRET, not SECRET, based on the legal definitions of those terms), but the whole plan doesn't need to be redacted and Congress should be kept informed. My recollection is that Reagan did inform members of Congress, but he kept it to senior leadership and didn't clue in all the relevant Committee members.

One of the changes to the law that should, in my opinion, be made, is that declassification authority should be expanded to Congress. Classification itself is almost certainly an executive branch function and should stay that way, but declassification is part of the oversight process.

[millari.livejournal.com]

I'm curious to read about that Executive Order. I will check that out.

And wow, the Joss thing was hysterical. I'm glad we remembered it. And this is coming from someone who HATED the Buffy musical episode. :)