Ensuring the Continuity of Congress

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

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Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic, disputed elections and threats against election officials have brought back into focus a set of questions first raised for many after the terrorist attacks of September 11. What would happen if a large number of members of Congress were dead, incapacitated or otherwise unable to meet to do the work of the country?

A new report from the American Enterprise Institute’s Continuity of Government Commission explores these questions. Lawfare senior editor and Brookings senior fellow Molly Reynolds sat down with Greg Jacob, a member of the commission, and AEI’s John Fortier, the commission's executive director, to discuss the continuity challenges facing Congress and what we might do to address them.

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Transcript

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1:02.0	We're talking about operating the House of Representatives
1:12.0	with a very small number of people.
1:14.0	It's 20 members and think about the ill-digitimacy issues
1:18.0	that might arise. They're all of one party.
1:22.0	The party is different than the party it was in charge before.
1:24.0	They're all from one state.
1:26.0	There are only 20 members, 415 districts, are unrepresented.
1:32.0	And that body, while we think, well, that's a kind of continuity
1:36.0	and there's some sort of house going along,
1:38.0	arguably they could actually do things that would really cause problems
1:42.0	that we've seen as illegitimate.
1:44.0	Maybe cause us to have inter-branched conflict
1:48.0	over the legitimacy of various actions.
1:50.0	And so, we don't think that those things can be dealt
	...

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