Bush,Congress,Cabinet killed in 9/11
- Thread starter Ohfshkssgb
- Start date
What does 'stop functioning' mean? The thousands upon thousands of people just go home and stop working?
Chapman
Donor
The IRS has a plan for how to return to collecting taxes 30 days after a decapitating nuclear strike.
You'd need something massive to truly get a collapse of the US federal government. This would be devastating make no mistake but I doubt it would cause a full on collapse, unless every governor in the country decides it's time to risk civil war by playing strongman.
No as alspug noted the main day-to-day decisions are by the in-place bureaucracy with not many major decisions by the "higher ups" needed for most cases. And in this case we've got an in-place "continuation of government" plan of action that can be brought into play and pretty much everyone knows the part they need to play. We may have to reach a bit further down the line-of-succession than we'd like, but it's all there already.
Randy
If the attacks on 9/11 decapitated much of the government, President Cheney would have launched the world's largest manhunt for Bin Laden and in this case, I think realistically, the Afghan government wouldn't have protected him. In the act of making the US government look weak, he would have hardened it even more than it had become after the OTL attacks. Bin Laden would have been killed within weeks at the least, months at the most. That's if the Afghan government hadn't handed him over. Also, the US would have garnished far more sympathy from the international community than in OTL. I, however, believe that the US would have led to larger occupations of Middle-Eastern nations in the name of fighting Islamic terrorism.
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Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails (or rather its alternate history future setting where aliens help the resistance against Dystopian American Exceptionalism) is what comes to mind.... pretty damn ASB but its like a neoconservatives wet dream had sex with For All Time and that timeline I can't seem to find anymore on here where the sub captain unleashes his own personal Samson Option upon the Middle East...
The federal government just wouldn't stop functioning even in a decapitating strike if the decapitation is only the federal government. You have 50 fully functional state governments that are likely completely rabid and foaming at the mouth to get the federal government running again, if only out of a desire to get the full might of the U.S. military going.
- The Senate: The States will very rapidly replace their Senators with temporary Governor appointees, special elections, or whatever other mechanisms they have to do so. You'll likely end up with a rump Congress consisting of just a Senate for a while. For all intents and purposes, they would be the United States Government until the next President is chosen.
- The House: IMO, it's a 50/50 shot whether the States rigidly obey Article I, Section 2, clause 4 that House vacancies are to be filled by special election only. At the very least there would likely be near immediate House elections, if not outright appointments as an emergency measure. Crises tend to make the Constitution more flexible.
- The President: When I said chosen, I was being literal. The new Senate will choose their President pro tempore, and that person will almost absolutely then resign that position to be made the Acting President under the Presidential Succession Act. I would imagine they'd pick someone with military experience as the Acting President would essentially have unilateral authority as Commander-in-Chief after such an unprecedented attack on U.S. soil.
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This. About the only way you can make the USA stop functioning is if you wipe out the executive branch, legislative branch and judicial branch on the federal level and most/all of them on state level.
...at which point you also start to run into a catch-22: if you have the capability to do this, either a) you have the capability to hurt the United States as a country in conventional ways, or b) the country is already in such a piss-poor state that carrying out your attack is redundant.
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Correct.
You also have the day to day operations still going. The mail will still be delivered. Social Security checks will still hit bank accounts.
That's not how things work in reality. The US government contrary to popular belief is pretty stable.
The federal government has a bad day, sure things get slowed down, there is a bit of a mess, but succession protocols go into effect, the states elect new representatives and the USA goes for blood as mentioned in a prior post by another poster. The after effect would be brutal if you were of Muslim background in the USA I would fear.
And human greed.
From taxes, no. The only other constant in life aside from death.
