re: #213 Outrider

#4 Secretary of State. How was that supposed to have worked when Henry Kissinger was our SoS?

He was ineligible, as was Madeline Albright.

Whether or not they possess presidential attributes, the total number of statutory presidential successors is, at most, sixteen - the Speaker of the House, the President pro tempore of the Senate, and the fourteen members of the cabinet. At any given moment, this number might be reduced by vacancies in these offices, the “inability” of the officers to act, or the ineligibility of some of these officers to assume presidential duties. An example of cabinet officers who are unable to act are those absent from Washington and unable to effectively communicate with Washington, as when several members of John Kennedy’s cabinet were on board a jet over the Pacific en route to Japan on November 22, 1963. Cabinets not infrequently contain naturalized citizens who are ineligible to discharge presidential duties (e.g., Henry Kissinger in the Nixon and Ford Administrations, Madeleine Albright in the Clinton Administration, and Elaine Chao and Mel Martinez in the current Administration), which may further reduce the pool of potential statutory successors.