End the Interregnum

July 4, 1960

On Nov. 8 a new President will be elected; but he will not take office until Jan. 20. In this period of ten weeks, President Eisenhower, under the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution (adopted in 1933) and the Presidential succession act of 1947, will retain the office and legal powers of the Presidency but will lose much of its authority and prestige.

This interregnum, which once lasted four months and still lasts two and a half, has always been potentially dangerous. On several occasions it has done incalculable harm. It was in the four months between the election and inauguration of Lincoln that seven states seceded from the Union and set up the Confederacy. In the interregnum after Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in 1932 business confidence deteriorated rapidly; insolvencies, bank closings, and unemployment mounted. Roosevelt still lacked power to act; Hoover then lacked the public support to lead.

The problem was posed also in 1916. “Again and again,” wrote President Wilson to Secretary Lansing in that year, “the question has arisen in my mind, what would it be my duty to do were Mr. Hughes to be elected? Four months would elapse before he could take charge of the affairs of the government, and during those four months I would be without such moral backing from the nation as would be necessary to steady and control our relations with other governments. . . . Such a situation would be fraught with the gravest dangers.”

WILSON’S SOLUTION

It would be his duty, he concluded, “to relieve the country of the perils of such a situation at once,” and if he could gain the consent of the persons involved, to “join the Vice President in resigning and thus open to Mr. Hughes the immediate succession to the Presidency. . . . The whole country has long perceived, without knowing how to remedy, the extreme disadvantage of having to live for four months after an election under a party whose guidance has been rejected at the polls.”

Though the interregnum period has been shortened by the Twentieth Amendment, it has not been eliminated. The succession act of 1947 prevents the solution proposed by Wilson in 1916. Yet the dangers of that period have been incalculably increased both by the potentialities of nuclear-missile blackmail and warfare and by the propensity of the Communists—Russian, Chinese, Cuban, or what not—to exploit any interval of weakness, uncertainty, or indecision.

There is still time, in the remaining days of the present session, for Congress to eliminate these needless risks and dangers. No further tampering with the Constitution is necessary. All that is needed is the appropriate changes in the Presidential succession law. Congress could simply add a provision permitting an outgoing President to resign in favor of the President-elect.

NONPARTISAN REFORM

It need hardly be added that such a revised law should impose no economic penalties on resignation. It should provide that the salary of any President who resigned for this purpose would be continued until Jan. 20, just as if he had remained in office. The new law should also, preferably, give the Vice President and each outgoing congressman or senator the same right of immediate resignation in favor of his elected successor, under similar salary provisions.

There would be nothing obligatory about such resignations. But once legal provision were made for them, and the precedent set, both outgoing congressmen and outgoing Presidents would probably be eager to take advantage of it. Nobody likes the label or the status of a lame duck.

I made a similar proposal in Newsweek of Nov. 17 and Dec. 1, 1952, following the election of Mr. Eisenhower. But proposals of this sort are too often judged by the way in which they will immediately affect specific persons. These few weeks before the nominations, and when nobody is sure whether our next President will be a Republican or a Democrat, would seem to be an ideal time for Congress to make this reform. Patriotic men of both parties could agree to it on a completely impersonal and nonpartisan basis.