Congress has never had much interest in confronting its own mortality—during the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower effectively coaxed into existence the congressional doomsday bunker at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia after legislative leaders dragged their feet—but the months after 9/11 raised new fears about just how unprepared Congress remained for any sort of widespread catastrophe involving its members.
Those fears were quickly underscored when Senate leaders like Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle received deadly anthrax at their offices, forcing the closure of 19 Capitol Hill office buildings. The anthrax attacks raised a new, scary possibility never contemplated during the Cold War: What if an attack incapacitated large numbers of senators and representatives without immediately killing them? From the 1940s to 1962, as it wrestled with the issue of presidential succession, Congress saw more than 30 different proposed bills and constitutional amendments about what to do in the case of a mass death of its membership—three of them were even passed by large margins out of the Senate, but every bill died untouched in the House, which stubbornly refused to contemplate its own mortality. Eventually, the issue fell from the legislative branch’s radar.
One of the stumbling blocks was that “continuity of Congress” was a misnomer. From the outside, the legislative branch might appear as a single entity housed in a single domed building. But the House and the Senate operate separately, each driven by and respectful of its own traditions and precedents. As James Madison explained in setting up the legislative branch, the Founders’ goal was to “divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them by different modes of election, and different principles of action, as little connected with each other, as the nature of their common functions, and their common dependence on the society, will admit.” Neither body has any ability to force its governance principles on the other—all procedures were arrived at either independently or by negotiation and compromise.
That history explains why, when it comes to questions of continuity and succession, the two bodies have evolved rather different approaches. The Senate—which until the early 20th century had a long tradition of appointed members rather than directly elected ones—had relatively clear constitutional policies about how to appoint interim senators to fill a vacancy. The House, though, had no clear way to reconstitute itself quickly, nor have its leaders been inclined to compromise what they see as their body’s unique character in the name of continuity efforts. That’s precisely the way House leaders want it to be: The House prides itself on the fact that every person who has ever set foot in the body has been duly elected by the people; its biennial elections keep it close to the will of the voters and make it a valuable check on the whims of the president and the Senate, whose longer terms allow them greater detachment from the populace.