Presidential Election in '74?

Among the unique and troubling aspects of the nation's political crisis is that President Nixon's impeachment now would place in the White House for three long years a man who had not been elected to national office. Since the resignation of former Vice President Spiro Agnew three weeks ago, there have been two possible successors to Nixon on the scene: his Vice President-designate Gerald Ford, or, should Nixon's departure come before Ford is confirmed, House Speaker Carl Albert. An Administration headed by either could not fail to seem somehow less legitimate than one headed by one of a party's two candidates in the previous election. Last week Boston Mayor Kevin White and two Harvard scholars reached into history to propound a fascinating and seemingly workable alternative: a mid-term presidential election in 1974.

The founding fathers debated such a plan at the Constitutional Convention, and the Second Congress wrote it into law in 1792. The law remained on the books for 94 years. Under 1 U.S. Statute 240 the President pro tern of the Senate--a presiding officer chosen by majority vote--was designated to become President if the offices of both the President and Vice President should become vacant, but only "until ... a President shall be elected." The law went on to detail how and when a special election would be called: new electors would be chosen in each state by the end of October, and the election held the following December. "The original intention of the framers was absolutely clear in debates in the Constitutional Convention," says Harvard Government Professor Samuel Huntington. They wanted new national elections held at the next regular opportunity, which, applied to present practice, would mean the first Tuesday of November 1974.

The provision was in effect made optional in the Presidential Succession Act of 1886 and dropped altogether in a 1947 succession law because many legislators thought it cumbersome. Yet Huntington and Harvard Law Professor Paul Freund are convinced that if and when a double vacancy occurs, an amendment to the 1947 act would enable the nation to schedule a special election to fill both offices. Such an amendment could be passed by a simple majority in both houses of Congress. It could of course be vetoed by Nixon or either Ford or Albert, if one of the two had by then succeeded Nixon. But had events moved far enough for Congress to feel the election was necessary, it would be a perilous veto for a President to exercise and one that Congress would likely override.

White, a Democrat, got the idea of looking for new succession mechanisms by recalling that the Massachusetts Senate seat of John Kennedy was filled by an appointee after Kennedy's election to President in 1960 for only two of the term's remaining four years. In 1962 voters chose the President's younger brother Edward to serve the last two years in a special senatorial election. The Boston mayor asked Huntington, his next-door neighbor, whether a similar plan might be possible on a presidential level, and after an hour's search through his books the Harvard professor was "amazed" to turn up the long-forgotten precedent. Says White: "It is a way to save the electorate from a dilemma that no one could face--divorce from the national leadership."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.