By Marc Ambinder

Rush Limbaugh wants to know: Does the military have contingency plans in the case of a president who is, well, "not too pro-American" in his outlook?

Yes, the broadcaster went there, while discussing the way the Pentagon plans for unexpected crises like Libya with a caller who served in the Pentagon during the 1980s. Limbaugh made sure to emphasize that he was not referring to any specific president... and intimated that he knew he would get in trouble for asking the question. 

"Are you aware of any military contingency plans for a president who might not be your prototypical pro-America president? Are there contingency plans to deal with a president who may not believe that the United States is the solution to the world's problems?" Limbaugh asked.

It used to be that Limbaugh would have found a more subtle way to hilariously (ha! ha!) point to the specter of a coup against a president he disliked, but he's the man behind the golden EIB microphone and I don't even have a face for radio. 

I do have, however, an answer to Limbaugh's question, whether he meant it or not.

The military's contingency plans expressly do not contain any instructions for overthrowing the sitting president. Maybe some Stranglovian planner in the era of 24/7 continuous engagement exercises of the Strategic Air Command drew up something in case a POTUS didn't have the cojones to turn the key, but after the Goldwater-Nichols Act reduced the power of the service chiefs and concentrated command and control authorities in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, such planners, disgruntled colonels -- they're always a colonel, right? -- probably don't exist.  

The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 spells out a procedure. Let's look at 3 USC 19, subsection "E."  We're dealing with a situation where there is no President, no Vice President, no Speaker of the House and no President Pro Tempore. The law then appoints the Secretary of State as President until either the end of the current president's term in office OR someone higher in the chain of command suddenly re-appears or recovers from injuries and is able to discharge the powers of office.  (The Secretary of Defense is sixth in line, after the Secretary of the Treasury.)

This seems clear: If it's not clear, after some sort of decapitation attack, whether the President, the Vice President or the two Congressional successors are alive, or if they're all alive but disabled, then the Cabinet secretaries become acting President -- until and unless a "prior entitled individual" is able to act.

Let's say that the POTUS, the VPOTUS, the Speaker and the President Pro Tempore are all injured; only the Vice President recovers. As soon as that person is eligible, he or she can "bump" the Acting President aside whenever he wants. Or not. Constitutional scholars don't like this "bumping" provision because it provides incentives for all sorts of mischief and works, really, assuming that national leaders are willing to completely surrender the attachments of their political party and identity. In fact, they don't like the act itself because it builds as much uncertainty into the system as it resolves.

So what does this have to do with Rush's original provocation? The problem is that, in a catastrophic emergency, the people who need to know who is in charge might not have the resources to find this out immediately. These people are, in particular, the Secret Service, and the folks who execute lawful orders from the National Command Authority (which is another name for the commander in chief's executive powers).  

If there's confusion about who's alive and who's dead, if the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are out of the country and can't communicate with the National Military Command Center and don't know who the acting President is, we might be in a pickle.  

Maybe the SecDef will assume, if he doesn't have contact with anyone above him in the chain of command, that HE is acting President. Maybe the Vice President will do the same if he can't reach the President -- or if the Secret Service doesn't know whether the President is alive.   These are extremely unlikely scenarios but ones that have to be accounted for in contingency planning. And they are. It is precisely these questions that are answered by the Continuity of Government programs that the executive branch goes to great lengths to keep under wraps.   

There ARE, in fact, Presidential Emergency Action Directives and other written plans that provide senior officials with what amount to checklists -- have you called here? Have you waited for "x" amount of time? Are you sure that FEMA hasn't done "y"? -- and then empower them to temporarily assume certain presidential empowers in order to make sure that (a) the actual, legal successor can be identified and protected and (b) the government can function. They even spell out what happens if someone lower in the line of succession tries to assume the authority of the president without there being enough certainty. This is scary stuff -- basically, it's the way the government plans to handle attempted coups against itself.  

The military nowhere has the authority to oversee this process of identifying a successor. The SecDef, certainly, as the civilian in charge of the military, directs a number of assets that help in the process and provide physical security, but the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has no independent authority to identify the successor or make decisions unless directed to by a higher authority. Of course, we can play out uncertainty scenarios to the Nth degree -- what if there is NO civilian authority to be found anywhere? -- but if that's the case, then the country is probably dealing with bigger problems and might welcome (for the moment) the reassuring presence of the name of the JCS.  But this stuff is all outside the realm of the law and extremely high in the realm of the improbable.  

Now -- since 9/11 -- more than $5 billion has been spent to make sure that the above scenarios don't happen.  A lot of the money has gone to communication upgrades to make sure members of the Cabinet can talk to each other even if a Borg cube swoops down and destroys Washington. I've been researching this subject for a while, and I discovered a couple of other things the government has done, some of it quite imaginative. It's the type of stuff that shouldn't find its way into print.  

These scenarios don't account for instances where the Secretary of Defense thinks the President is crazy; James Schlesinger, Nixon's final SecDef, reportedly informed the nuclear command and control officers that they ought to check with him if they received any unusual orders from the President ... and this was during Nixon's late paranoid stage. That was highly, totally, uncompromisingly unconstitutional, but it was arguably quite practical, given the consequences of a nuclear war.  

And there is Alexander Haig's famous declaration of certitude that he was in charge during the confusion after Ronald Reagan was shot. The Secretary of State had forgotten, apparently, that the Speaker of the House and the Senate President Pro Tempore were above him in the line of succession, although Haig would later insist he meant to say that he was in charge of the White House and its immediate executive functions until Vice President Bush returned to Washington.  (Though Reagan's "biscuit" -- his nuclear command code verification card -- was misplaced during the shooting, Bush was connected to the National Military Command Center at all times.  There was no abrogation of the National Command Authority.)

So, questions of taste aside, Mr. Limbaugh, the answer to your question is: No, the military cannot foment a coup against a president they deem as sufficiently un-American and they do not have contingency plans, Top Secret or otherwise to do so. 

By Marc Ambinder

First, to get some qualifications out of the way: I am not cooperating with New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich, nor had I been aware of his book project before POLITICO disclosed its existence. Second, like many reporters, I had textual intercourse with Kurt Bardella, the now-former spokesperson for Rep. Darrell Issa.

Our exchanges generally consisted of my attempting to confirm something that someone else reported or Bardella giving me a tip about what his boss was up to the next
day. I do not, as a matter of management, share my private e-mails with anyone,
but I don't recall sending Bardella anything that would interest Leibovich.