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To: Ben Antanaitis who wrote (63568)	8/29/1998 5:24:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

OT: Strummie No, sorry, with a Vice Presidential vacancy, the President nominates a Vice President who takes office on confirmation by a majority vote of both houses of Congress. (XXV Amendment 1966 -- the provisions of which controlled the situation when in 1973 Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned to avoid prosecution, and President Nixon nominated Representative Gerald Ford who was in office as VP to succeed Nixon when he resigned to avoid impeachment and could then pardon Nixon to end the national agony.) I have some hereditary responsibility for Strom's still being around. When he was a boy in Edgefield, S.C., he jumped off a railroad trestle into the creek in order to claim the title of "the bravest of the brave" (left vacant by the prior execution of Marshal Ney) and almost drowned. My father and my uncles, putting political differences aside, rescued him and magnanimously granted him the desired sobriquet (or at least that's the story I was told by my uncles, one of whom (a lawyer) was honest enough to turn in the other (a preacher) to the cops on another occasion). Strom was later a brigadier general in World War II. He was also the judge (Georgetown S.C.) in what was considered in civil rights circles as the judicial murder of a African-American man. He was governor of South Carolina, and in 1948 led the withdrawal of segregationists from the Democratic convention in opposition to a platform supporting civil rights. He received over a million popular votes (States' Rights Party -- "Dixiecrats"), slightly more than Henry Wallace's Progressive Party. Despite the defection of the left and right, the Democrats won and Harry Truman was reelected over Thomas Dewey. Strom was later elected to the Senate as a Democrat, opposed civil rights legislation, turned his coat to Republican, and is still there (sort of). As dean (longest sitting member) of the Senate and a member of the majority party, he is customarily elected President Pro-tem of the Senate. Despite this brilliant career, I will predict that he will never become president, despite the faint possibility that there might be a simultaneous vacancy in the presidency, vice presidency, and speakership -- in which case he would become acting president as third in succession. Of course, should all four of these offices be vacant, Madeline Albright, Secretary of State, would become acting president except for the fact that she could not qualify, not being a natural born American citizen (she was born in what was then Czechoslovakia). Failing her, succession would fall to Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin -- an excellent outcome, in my opinion, to a very messy situation.