Doesn't the Speaker's or the President Pro Tempore's ascension to Acting President depend on their resignation? They could simply decline it, right?
And if they did ascend, if they nominated and confirmed a Vice President, would that Vice President immediately become President?
This was a very real question in 2000. If the FL recount had not been resolved by SCOTUS, there were various legal groups investigating what might happen if FL electoral votes did not arrive for Congress to count them. Speaker Hastert was considering the possibility that he might be called upon to serve as Acting President until the FL situation was resolved. He was considering whether or not to accept if called upon.
nb. I'm going to delete your post in the ancient thread even though the title there might be more appropriate.
That's certainly one way it could have gone, although the likelihood of that outcome is debatable. There's a few ways that it could have gone down in congress had
Bush v. Gore come out differently.
The majority in
Bush v. Gore cited a risk that if a winner wasn't certified by the December 12th safe harbor deadline (the importance of which the Court greatly exagerated IMO), Florida could potentially submit two rival slates of electors to congress, one resulting from the Florida Supreme Court certifying Gore as the winner after a recount, and another appointed by the legislature and/ or certified by the Governor declaring Bush the winner. Then when the electoral votes were opened and counted before a joint session of congress, both chambers would have to decide which electors to count. It's certainly
possible that they could decide to count neither, in which case the election would indeed have been thrown to the House. (Federal statutes passed after 1876 are supposed to govern which result congress respects in that scenario, defaulting to the electors certified by the state's executive, but it's an open question whether such a statute could constitutionally bind congress's decision).
Or even if you had just one slate of electors coming out of, for instance, a scenario in which the recount could not be completed by December 18 (when the electors had to actually meet to cast their votes) and the legislature appointed the electors itself, the result could have still been challenged in congress at the counting, and both houses would still have to vote on whether to count Florida's result.
This is actually an instance where it might have mattered whether the outgoing or incoming congress did the counting of the electoral votes. Assuming the new congress counted the electoral votes as usual in either of the above scenarios, the 50-50 Senate actually was actually in Democratic control via Vice President Gore's tie-breaking vote until January 20, 2001. If the House voted to count Bush as the winner while the Senate voted to accept a Gore slate/ reject a Bush slate, then you either end up with:
1. A compromise in which congress leaves Florida unallocated and the election is thrown to the Republican House, in which case Bush wins. OR
2. A scenario in which congress is deadlocked and cannot certify the Electoral Vote Count and has to resort to a more "exotic" compromise like a redux of 1876 where a special Electoral Commission decided which results to count.
If no compromise could be reached by January 20, then Hastert would indeed have been called upon to act as President. But at that point the Senate would've come back into Republican control, and congress could then just certify Bush as the winner of Florida and thus the presidency, so the Hastert administration would be extremely short-lived
