@karabaic Uh...yeah. Where to start?
Directive 51 does not give the president any additional powers beyond normal emergency declarations. It does something far more drastic: it creates an emergency shadow government to locate and coordinate the pieces of shattered US govt
Directive 51 does not give the president any additional powers beyond normal emergency declarations. It does something far more drastic: it creates an emergency shadow government to locate and coordinate the pieces of shattered US govt
@karabaic Directive 51 essentially anticipates that the greater part of the Federal government are dead, captured, or otherwise unavailable to govern, and that all our many other levels in our complex federal system are in deep shit too. The president can activate it for things like ...
@karabaic ... incoming nuclear missile, maybe a super-Carrington event, possibly disease outbreak on the scale of The Stand, impending asteroid impact, etc. IF there's time. More likely the National Constitutional Continuity Coordinator would have to determine, him/herself, that ...
@karabaic ... Federal government was decapitated _beyond succession_ -- that's POTUS, VP, Speaker, Senate PresProTem,and 15 cabinet officers all permanently gone, not enough House or Senate members to elect new speaker or PPT, not enough states functional to send new reps/Senators.
@karabaic That's not one but FOUR ways for the government to continue before the National Constitutional Continuity Coordinator would begin to govern,as opposed to just locating highest-in-succession person and surviving Congress and saying "Tag, you're it. Need a ride to a secure bunker?"
@karabaic NONE of those involve giving the president power. Now, if all four paths fail, the NCCC is stuck with a Kafkaesque job: using as much of the surviving fed/state/county/local/tribal/territorial/commonwealth governments as they can find, handle the things that can't wait ...
@karabaic ... for as long as necessary,but as quickly, restore normal constitutional government and hand over power to it. In short, for as brief a time as possible the NCCC is supposed to be an extra-constitutional monarch with the dual role of governing and of abolishing themself.
@karabaic If the president is alive, functioning, not under duress, and able to get in touch with the rest of us, Directive 51 emphatically DOES NOT APPLY.
End rant, I guess. I can go on about all this, as is historically demonstrated...
barnesandnoble.com/w/directive-51…
End rant, I guess. I can go on about all this, as is historically demonstrated...
barnesandnoble.com/w/directive-51…
