Do You Know the Presidential Line of Succession?

When 9th President William Henry Harrison died while in office in 1841, his vice president, John Tyler, became the answer to a trivia question: Tyler was the first VP to assume the office of the presidency. Tyler’s role was defined by Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, in which the vice president is given the “powers and duties” of the highest office in the country if the president is absent from office.

But who steps in if the vice president either can’t ascend, resigns, or is otherwise unable to perform in office? And what happens if that person can’t do the job? That’s where the presidential line of succession comes in. It provides a very thorough path to transfer power. See if you can put the various titles in the order in which they would take office in the quiz below.

Presidential succession is detailed in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1967. Prior to that, what exactly would happen should a president die, resign, or otherwise be unable to perform their duties was ambiguous. The vice president might be an obvious choice, but by 1967, that office had been vacated 16 times, making a clear line of power transfer necessary. It also clarified that role: When Tyler took over, he came under fire for insisting he was president, not that he was merely assuming the powers and duties of the office.

Despite the clarification, there are still some unanswered questions. When an office that’s part of the succession is vacated, as House speaker was in 2023, it could lead to confusion over who should be next in line. If a political seat is occupied by a naturalized citizen, they may not be eligible for the office of the presidency. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, for example, was born in Cuba.

So far, the country hasn’t had to face the issue head on. The line of succession has never moved beyond the vice president, though the country may have been closer to that scenario than anyone imagined. When John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865, he wanted accomplice George Atzerodt to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson. The VP was alone in a hotel; Atzerodt could have done so easily, but he lost his nerve and remained at the hotel bar.

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