Less than 30 days out from the US election, what happens if Trump’s condition worsens – or he dies? A former member of the office of the White House chief of staff explains how the line of succession works.

Since Donald Trump was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for Covid-19 treatment on October 2 (US time), there have been conflicting messages about the status of the president’s health.

While his doctor, Sean Conley, gave an upbeat account around noon on Sunday (US East Coast time), the president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told reporters the day before, “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”

The prospect that Trump could be or become very ill raises the question of how the country can constitutionally transfer power if he is no longer capable of serving in his official capacity.

The answer is the little-used 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

That amendment has only been invoked a few times in history. And its lack of specificity about a situation in which the president is unable to determine himself whether he can carry out his duties means there is a potential constitutional crisis ahead in which the president may be unable or unwilling to give up power, even if he is clearly too ill to do his job.

Removal, resignation or death

The 25th Amendment, ratified by the states in 1967, declares that upon the removal, resignation or death of the president, the vice-president assumes the presidency.

Commonly referred to as the Disability Clause, this constitutional provision also specifies that if the president is unable to perform the functions of his office, the vice president will serve as acting president.

If the president is unable to determine his own decision-making capacity, it is possible – though this is an untested area of law – that the vice-president, independently or in consultation with the cabinet, would determine if he himself assumes the role of acting president.

But there is no precedent for this type of situation nor is there precise legal language that expressly outlines what the procedural processes should be if the president cannot determine his own ability to lead the nation. This is the constitutional crisis that may lay ahead.

In 2002 and 2007, President George W. Bush invoked the Disability Clause prior to scheduled colonoscopy procedures that required anesthesia and sedation. During this limited time, Vice President Dick Cheney became acting president.

Line of succession

In addition to the Disability Clause, there is legislation that clarifies the line of succession should the president become incapacitated.

The 1886 Succession Act made members of the president’s cabinet direct successors if the vice president could not serve.

Upon assuming the presidency in 1945 after President Franklin Roosevelt’s death, Harry Truman requested Congress to amend the 1886 Succession Act to provide greater clarification of succession protocol.

Truman wanted that succession to place the speaker of the House second in line after the vice president. After several years of negotiation, both houses of Congress agreed to this revision and passed the Presidential Succession Act in 1947.

The legislation specified that the line of succession begins with the vice president and is followed by the speaker of the House of Representatives, the president pro tempore of the Senate, the secretary of the U.S. Department of State, the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and the remaining secretaries of cabinet departments in the order of when they were established as executive branch agencies.

Neither the Succession Act nor the 25th Amendment have ever been invoked for longer than a few hours.

Potential crisis

Since March 2020, the U.S. has faced an extraordinary public health catastrophe. More than 200,00 Americans have died from the coronavirus and more than 7.2 million have been infected.

Over the last seven months, the president has publicly disagreed with his own team of medical and public health experts regarding precautionary measures that should be taken in order to minimize exposure to the virus. His staff have largely followed his lead.

Of particular note is a private White House reception and Rose Garden announcement to nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court. More than 200 people attended, including many of the administration’s most senior appointees and aides.

Few at this event wore a mask. And now a number of prominent attendees – including GOP senators Thom Tillis and Mike Lee, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway – have tested positive for coronavirus.

As someone who has worked in the office of the White House chief of staff during the Clinton administration, I can personally attest to the confining environment of the West Wing.

Very few senior aides have their own offices. People are constantly in close proximity, including the president, which is why it remains perplexing that White House staff were not required to wear masks.

The decision to ignore CDC guidelines in the West Wing, at official government functions and at campaign events, coupled with the president’s disparagement of public health measures, have placed the country into a potential leadership crisis where it is not clear who should be in charge.

Stephanie Newbold is an associate professor of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The path might be steep and unsteady, but there is a path to victory that could see Judith Collins sworn in as prime minister after October 17. Toby Manhire crunches the numbers.

To be clear: with 12 days to go the National Party remains very much the underdog. Several polls in recent months have put Labour not just heading for victory, but capable of governing as a single-party majority government – something that has not been delivered since MMP was introduced in 1996.

National would need a lot of things to go right to defy the odds. It’s far from in their control. But they’re still in it. Let’s take a look at the party’s likeliest path to government – one which doesn’t require support for any party to move up or down by more than a few points.

National + Act

Pending some unimaginable upheaval, National’s path to government will need the support of Act. The free-market, free-speech, anti-gun-reform party has soaked up a good number of disaffected National voters and surged to the brink of its best election result ever. Any National-led government will have Act as coalition partner or confidence and supply ally.

Keep the momentum and mop up the minnows

Ever since the first leaders’ debate, Judith Collins has taken on a new lease of leadership. The confidence appears to be translating into improved polling, with the soothing performances of Shane Reti making up for the holes in Paul Goldsmith’s bucket.

Recent days have seen Judith Collins making an unmistakable play for votes from people who might have gravitated towards other smaller parties. A sudden run of references to her Christian faith, and a visit to an Anglican church, look like a medium-term play to solidify support in caucus, but also an invitation back to the mothership to the 1.4% of the electorate planning to vote New Conservative, according to the last Colmar Brunton / TVNZ poll. There have also been policy embraces of the racing industry – hello the remaining NZ First loyalists (1.4%)! Pronouncements on gun reform in the second debate round off a busy time of pitching the big tent on the right.

Labour voter complacency

The strength of Labour’s polling – over 50% a number of times – combined with the sometimes slapstick scenes that have bedevilled National in 2020 could see the turnout for the incumbents slip. There’s nothing National can really do to influence that, though, and they certainly won’t be relying on it happening.

The ‘shy Tory’ effect

The so-called “shy Tory” factor was coined to describe a phenomenon in which the Conservative Party of the UK outperforms its polling numbers. The theory goes that people are reluctant to voice their position to the pollsters, but once in the booth vote for a tax cut or toughness in law and order. Conceivably, this might be more pronounced under a more rightwing leader such as Judith Collins than you’d see under, say, John Key. Again, however, this is the last thing National would be wanting to depend on.

Half the house doesn’t need half the votes

Last week’s Colmar Brunton poll had National on 33% and Act on 8%. Together, the two parties were up three points from a week earlier. Labour was on 47% and the Greens on 7%, respectively down and up one point, so unchanged when stuck together.

The parties of the right are inching up, then, but with voting already under way, a combined 50% of the vote looks like fantasyland. The good news is they don’t need 50%.

The votes for any party that falls under the 5% threshold and fails to win a constituency go into a basket that is often labelled “wasted vote”. A better name might be “unrepresented vote”. Let’s say that the unrepresented vote amounts to 5% – as it roughly did at the last election. That would leave 95% represented vote, and so to command a majority in parliament, or 61 of the 120 seats, you’d need more than half of that 95%: anything more than 47.5%.

(It might be a bit different if there were an “overhang”, triggered by a party winning more constituency seats than the proportion they’d be entitled to under their party vote, but let’s leave that to one side for now.)

On current polling, the probability is there will be a low number of parties going to parliament: just four. But what if it was only three?

A Green wipe-out

National’s best path to victory would see the Greens fall under 5%. Across six Colmar Brunton polls this year the party has averaged 5.6%. The most recent result – 7% – will have sent waves of relief through the party, but it’s not quite banked yet. The Greens’ final results have tended to be slightly below their poll numbers, and there have been some suggestions that the Covid election might mean a dip in overseas voting turnout, where the Greens have traditionally performed disproportionately well.

For National, it’s another area in which there are few tactics that could help them – a full-bore attack on the Greens would likely only embolden their cause. But were the Greens to dip under that 5%, and with Chlöe Swarbrick a very longshot in Auckland Central, the door would open further for a Collins win. Indeed, nothing would be sweeter for National prospects than a Green result of 4.95%.

To the numbers

With all of the above in mind, it seems to me the likeliest path to a National-led government would, in short, see:

1. National continues to climb, up to over 37%.
2. Labour accordingly drops a couple of points.
3. Act holds steady at around 8%.
4. Green Party falls under 5% and fails to win an electorate.
5. No other party surpasses 5% or wins an electorate, but combined collect around 5% of the vote.

Let’s plug all that into the Electoral Commission’s handy MMP calculator.

Parliament would end up looking like this:

That would mean a deeply un-MMP-looking parliament of three parties; and those who insisted in 2017 that the biggest party should lead the government would be biting their tongues.

Is it likely? No. But it’s a long way from impossible.