‘One pistol clip can change the balance of power’: Congress is wholly unprepared for a mass casualty event

Over the past 15 years, members of Congress have survived two near-deadly shootings, a train crash with dozens of them on board, and a Capitol riot that had hundreds of lawmakers fearing for their lives.

Despite those incidents, the institution is wholly unprepared for a catastrophic event that kills or incapacitates multiple members — even if that hypothetical tragedy results in a major power shift: changing which party holds the majority in the House or Senate.

Members of Congress themselves have proposed a host of solutions to the havoc a mass casualty could wreak. Those propositions range from a constitutional amendment allowing members to designate their own successors to simple rule changes to prevent violence from shifting party power. But a POLITICO review shows that both Republican and Democratic leaders, including chairs of key committees, have failed to significantly advance any of the ideas proposed since a mass shooting at a GOP baseball practice in 2017. That’s largely based on a reluctance to acknowledge the issue and a general resistance in Congress to changing rules.

That strikes many members as foolhardy.

“The number of rounds in one pistol clip can change the balance of power of the House or the Senate,” said former Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), who took up the issue after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when a hijacked plane came within 20 minutes of crashing into the Capitol.

Lawmakers and their staff face real threats of political violence every day. Capitol Police opened 8,008 cases to assess threats against lawmakers in 2023, a 100 percent increase from 2017. The two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump are blaring reminders of the ever-present dangers for public officials.

The lack of a plan to respond to a mass casualty is particularly acute in the House: It has no mechanism to quickly fill unexpected vacancies, even on a temporary basis. Instead, a special election must be held to replace a member. That can take months.

In the meantime, the House would have to operate shorthanded — perhaps extremely shorthanded. But doing so could leave a vast swath of the country unrepresented, meaning any action that Congress takes would be vulnerable to a court challenge.

In practice, this could mean putting the full power of the chamber in the hands of members who, for example, boycott a State of the Union address or speech from a foreign dignitary only to see their colleagues who attend killed in a terrorist attack. Events like party conventions, caucus retreats and international member trips are also known potential targets.

And there’s another worry: What if the slim congressional margins create an incentive for an act of political violence explicitly designed to shift control from one party to the other?

“Part of the problem right now is someone with bad intentions could flip a majority for four months. And that's horrifying,” said Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.), referring to how long it might take to fill vacancies through special elections, rather than immediate appointments. “And our reaction can't be, ‘Well, that'll never happen.’ Or, ‘Well, we'll deal with that when the time comes.’ Because once the time comes, it’s too late.”

Following multiple potentially deadly crises, House leaders in both parties have deprioritized or ignored the issue. No speaker since 9/11 — including Mike Johnson and his two predecessors, Kevin McCarthy and Nancy Pelosi — has put their political heft behind proposals to prepare the legislature for a catastrophe.

And without such high-level support, plans to prepare Congress for a mass casualty event have fallen victim to jurisdictional scuffles and lawmaker bickering.

Right now, the main idea to address the issue is a constitutional amendment that would require members of the House to submit a list of at least five possible successors to be tapped in the event of their death. If any member dies in office, the state’s governor would select an individual from the list to serve on a temporary basis until officials hold a special election for a permanent replacement.

That proposal is being pushed by Kilmer and Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who say it would remove an incentive for political violence and preserve the legitimacy of Congress in a crisis. Wenstrup was on the baseball field in Virginia in 2017 when a gunman took aim at Republicans. He used his military and medical training to treat then-GOP Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) until paramedics arrived.

“There were 136 rounds fired that morning, and he had names of Republicans and descriptions in his pocket,” Wenstrup said. “The idea is for us to have a situation in place where no one can get away with doing that as far as changing the balance of power.”

“I worry that my friends and the Democratic caucus think I'm the angel of death,” Kilmer said, “because we'd be on a bus to a retreat, and I'll be like, ‘does anyone know what happens if we die? Or if something happens to the bus?’ And they’re like ‘Kilmer? Enough already.’”

Of course, approving a constitutional amendment would be incredibly difficult: It requires two-thirds support of each congressional chamber and then ratification from three-fourths of state legislatures.

But there is a precedent for it. The 17th Amendment, enacted over a century ago, created a succession plan for Senate vacancies that empowered 45 states to allow the governor to temporarily appoint a replacement until an election is held. Five states still don’t allow appointments and require a special election.

The House could try other avenues if a constitutional amendment isn’t possible. Some members have mulled changes to House rules designed to prevent a mass casualty from switching control of the chamber to the opposite party mid-session. Another idea would be to impose strict mandates on states to hold swift special elections after a mass vacancy.

But advocates warn against such a piecemeal approach. Some in the chamber view the changes made after 9/11 as simply providing the veneer of solving the problem.

As it stands now, the House can only fill its vacancies only by special election, which take an average of 136 days to conduct. If a crisis occurred, Congress’ role as a check on the executive branch could be severely diminished precisely when the federal government potentially needs to act.

Opportunities to address the issue — known in congressional parlance as “continuity of government” — have come and gone over the past quarter century. The 2001 terrorist and anthrax attacks focused attention on it, as did the baseball practice shooting, in which six people were shot, including Scalise. In 2018, a train carrying Republican lawmakers to a retreat crashed into a truck, killing a passenger.

But after each incident, attention faded. The most robust examination was after 9/11, when proposals for succession planning were seriously considered but faced strong opposition from Republican Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner and David Dreier, who ran the Judiciary and Rules committees, respectively. The response to the terror attacks, from the Patriot Act to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, took precedence.

In response to more recent events, the House has boosted Capitol Police spending and expanded its authority to enhance the security of individual members, without parallel efforts to protect the House’s ability to operate. 

A post-9/11 law mandates that special elections be held within seven weeks of a mass vacancy, which is defined as one that creates 100 vacancies. But meeting that timeline could be impossible in the wake of a crisis.

Forty-one states do not have laws that bring them into compliance to hold special elections in the time frame required by federal law. And 15 of 27 state election officials who responded to a 2024 Government Accountability Office survey said they were unaware of the federal law to expedite special elections after a mass casualty incident.

Doug Lewis, a certified election registration administrator and former executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors, told lawmakers at a public hearing in 2022 that it would likely take at least 60 days and possibly a lot longer.

Since 2020, Kilmer, who chaired the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, has been looking at how Congress would function if faced with a deadly crisis. He held closed-door meetings and listening sessions with experts and helmed the 2022 public hearing.

In December 2022, the panel recommended appointing a joint House-Senate committee to examine how to ensure “continuing representation and congressional operations” in the event of tragedy. That recommendation has seemingly been ignored; such a committee was never created.

Instead, the matter is in the domain of the House Judiciary Committee, which is known for bitter partisan infighting.

In May 2023, Kilmer was looking for Republicans to collaborate with on the issue and met with Johnson, who at the time was chair of the Judiciary Committee’s Constitution Subcommittee.

“He basically said that this seems like a legitimate problem and asked me to keep him abreast as I continued the effort,” said Kilmer.

But Kilmer hasn’t approached Johnson again since he became speaker. “It feels like he has 99 problems and I don’t need to be one,” Kilmer said.

Johnson’s office declined to comment on whether the speaker supports the constitutional amendment proposal.

Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), who served on the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, argues that filling vacancies en masse with temporary appointments is at odds with the founders’ vision for the House.

“You want to make sure you have a body that's always elected directly by the people,” Latta said. “That's what they call it ‘The People's House.’ It's the closest to the people.”

Latta, who was first elected to the House in a special election three months and six days after his predecessor had died and left a vacancy, said each state’s election apparatus should expedite special elections if the need arises.

His position aligns with previous opponents of an appointment-based system, including former Rep. Sensenbrenner, whose chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee from 2001 to 2007 and partnership with then-Rules chair Dreier gave him a prime platform to reject proposals in the post-9/11 period.

But now that vehement opponents like Sensenbrenner have left key roles in the House, there is some optimism that this effort could garner more support.

Despite the lack of real progress over the years, there is some movement. The House Administration Committee’s subpanel on modernization held a hearing on continuity of Congress in mid-September.

That’s the kind of open forum that Kilmer has been pushing for, even if it results in changes to the appointment plan that he and Wenstrup have proposed.

“I haven't heard a good argument for not doing this. And I haven't heard a better proposal to solve these problems,” said Kilmer. “I'm not sure I love this solution, but I can't come up with a better one.”

Lawmakers have resisted this type of planning in part not just because of the congressional majority question, but also because it means confronting their own mortality. No one relishes thinking about losing their power, or their life.

“It's hard work to contemplate your own death,” said Baird, a clinical psychologist.

One major rule change that was accomplished after the 9/11 attacks was the advent of a “catastrophic quorum.” If a large number of House members are missing, incapacitated or incapable of attending House proceedings, whoever remains would constitute the House.

In the two decades since, the House has adopted this rule at the start of each Congress. Attempts to challenge it — on the basis that it would deprive a large portion of the country of representation — have been thwarted. Key staffers for leadership and on the GOP-led House Rules Committee viewed the quorum rules as adequate, according to half a dozen aides and lawmakers from both parties.

But many Republicans and Democrats who want the House to enact reform see the quorum rules as, at best, a half-measure that provides false comfort and, at worst, unconstitutional. In the wake of a national crisis, Congress could be made up of a small subsection of lawmakers.

A deadly event that leaves a severely diminished House population would instantly throw the legitimacy of decisions made in the chamber into question.

South Carolina Rep. William Timmons, who was Kilmer’s GOP co-chair of the modernization panel, warned that the emergency quorum rule would “potentially create additional legal challenges,” and bring the legitimacy of every action the House took into question.

“I think there is sometimes a tendency for people to not want to reflect. … It's like, well, it wasn’t me, right?” Wenstrup said. “But now with this, we've seen pretty clearly: It really can be me. This isn't a one off.”