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FootnoteTV (TM) : The West Wing Examining the issues behind your favorite TV shows, episode by episode. More info here.   (Frames) | <--- Episode ---> Life on Mars (episode 86). Vice President John Hoynes resigns (1) after new White House associate counsel Joe Quincey uncovers Hoynes' affair with a D.C. socialite who is about to write a tell-all book. The first indication of the scandal is a journalist's question as to whether Hoynes has suppressed a report about a meteorite containing evidence of life on Mars (2). Will and his team of Lauras (originally from episodes 81 and 82) brainstorm ways of responding to a new television ad attacking the administration's position on automobile fuel efficiency (3). The White House Resignation of a Vice President (last updated April 30, 2003) (back to top) Two vice presidents have resigned from office. The first was John C. Calhoun, who resigned in 1832 after he had a falling out with President Andrew Jackson, and the second was Spiro T. Agnew, who resigned in 1973 amidst charges that he had evaded paying federal taxes and receiving kickbacks. Procedures for handling the resignation of a vice-president are set by the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and Chapter 3, Section 20 of the United States code. The vice president can resign only by delivering an instrument in writing to the Secretary of State (3 USC 20), and the president must fill a vacancy by nominating a new vice president who can take office after being confirmed by a majority vote of both the Senate and the House of Representatives (section 2 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, full text on-line here). The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was not in place when Calhoun resigned in December 1832, just weeks before the end of his term, and so his office was simply left vacant until Martin Van Buren was sworn in as planned as Jackson's second vice president. It was in effect when Agnew resigned on October 10, 1973, and President Richard Nixon nominated Gerald Ford just two days later; Ford was sworn as Vice President two months after being nominated, and became President in August 1974 after Nixon resigned. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment The Twenty-fifth Amendment was created in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, adopted by Congress in 1964, and finally ratified by the states in 1967, and it dictates how executive power is transferred when the chief executive is "unable to discharge" his duties. The first two sections clarify the succession from president to vice president, and were used in the 1970s when Nixon filled Agnew's vacancy with Ford in 1973, and when Ford then replaced Nixon as president in 1974 and nominated Nelson Rockefeller as his own vice president. Under the third section, the president can voluntarily transmit a "written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office," and until he transmits another written declaration to the contrary, the vice president serves as acting president with full powers and duties. This section has never been formally invoked, despite two known opportunities - both during the Reagan presidency - in which it (or the fourth section) arguably should have been. Finally, the fourth section, which has never been invoked, does empower the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to remove a president who does not or cannot recognize such inability. President James A. Garfield was in a coma for 80 days after being shot by an assassin in 1881, and President Woodrow Wilson was invalid for much of his last term as president, and the fourth section provides a procedure for the Vice-President to step up in such cases. If the president is able to challenge the decision and does so, he resumes power, but the vice president can re-affirm his declaration that the president is unable to serve and resume power temporarily. The president will ultimately resume power unless Congress decides by a 2/3 vote of both houses that the president is unable to serve or if sufficient time has passed without Congress making such a decision. Source: Jules Witcover, Crapshoot: Rolling the Dice on the Vice Presidency (Crown Publishers, 1992). Findlaw's annotation on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is on-line here. Kenneth Crispell and Carlos Gomez, Hidden Illness in the White House (Duke University Press, 1988). Life on Mars (last updated April 30, 2003) (back to top) Is there evidence of life on Mars? NASA reported in August 1996 that a meteorite containing carbonate particles did seem to show evidence for primitive life on Mars about 3.6 billion years ago, but the scientific community continues to debate whether this conclusion was warranted. The meteorite, identified as ALH84001, was found in 1984 in the Allen Hills region of Antarctica, and it was not identified as being from Mars until 1993. It weighed just 1.9 kilograms and was about the size of a potato, and it is one of just 12 meteorites that had been identified as of the late 1990s as coming from Mars. The meteorite is believed to have crystallized about 4.5 billion years ago on Mars and to have cracked sometime while there, to have been dislodged from Mars by a huge impact about 16 million years ago, and to have landed on Earth about 13,000 years ago. Continuing Debate over ALH84001 In August 1996, NASA officials announced that a study of ALH84001 had concluded that it proved the existence of some kind of primitive life on Mars. Dave McKay and eight co-writers pointed to several features of the meteorite, such as the resemblance of small carbonate areas on the rock to microfossils and the presence of magnetite particles that could have resulted from biological reactions, and wrote that while "none of these observations is in itself conclusive for the existence of past life," they together amounted to "evidence for primitive life on Mars." ALH84001 during initial processing A high-resolution image of a chain of magnetite crystals (marked by the arrows) in ALH84001 that some believe shows evidence of past biological activity However, scientists have continued to study the meteorite and have not definitively confirmed McKay's initial conclusions as of yet. Several of the features that were identified as suggestive of life on Mars have been discredited, and some have argued that bacteria could not be small enough to leave behind microfossils. As a team of writers put it in a November 2001 article, "data amassed since the McKay paper have resulted in the effective elimination of all but one of the original arguments. The case for former Martian life now rests on the identification of a small subset of the magnetite crystals in ALH84001 as biogenic in origin." A team of NASA scientists did conclude in a February 2001 article that the shape of the magnetite crystals found in ALH84001 provide evidence of past biological activity and concluded that the decomposed remains of bacteria could have been deposited in the cracks of ALH84001 while it was still on Mars, but others have criticized this conclusion. Missions to Mars The quest to determine whether life ever existed on Mars thus proceeds in two fronts, with some scientists continuing to study ALH84001 and other Martian meteorites for evidence of past biological activity, and NASA's attempts to locate areas on Mars itself that may once have contained water and thus would be more likely areas to find more compelling evidence. Whether or not ALH84001 does show sufficient evidence of past life on Mars, the news has helped rejuvenate NASA's efforts to reach the fourth planet. The first wave was in the 1970s and culminated with the Viking 1's first successful landing in 1976, and a second wave in the early 1990s failed when the Mars Observer lost contact just before entering Mars orbit in 1993. NASA launched a new era in 1996 and 1997 with the Pathfinder mission and the Mars Global Surveyor, and followed that up in 2001 with the Mars Odyssey 2001. The Pathfinder landed on July 4, 1997 with the Sojourner land rover, the first rover on another planet; Sojourner provided the first close-up photographs of Mars in decades and lasted for three months. The Mars Global Surveyor reached Mars orbit in September 1997 and began mapping the planet in March 1999. The Mars Odyssey 2001 arrived at Mars in October 2001, and is also mapping the planet for minerals and water. Looking forward, NASA plans to send two more exploration rovers to Mars in June 2003 to conduct tests on two locations that might have once had water. As of October 2002, NASA's long-term plans included another reconnaissance satellite in 2005, a long-range mobile science lab in 2009, and the first-ever mission that would return samples to Earth in 2014 or later. Sources: The original article by Dave McKay and eight co-authors concluding that ALH84001 showed evidence of past life on Mars is Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001 (on-line here. Pictures of ALH84001 are on-line via NASA here. Peter R. Buseck et al, Magnetite morphology and life on Mars, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 98, Issue 24, 13490-95 (November 20, 2001), on-line via the PNAS here. E. Imre Friedman et al, Chains of magnetite crystals in the meteorite ALH84001: Evidence of biological origin, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 98, Issue 5, 2176-2181 (February 27, 2001), also , on-line via the PNAS here. and with a NASA press release on-line here. NASA has collected information on its various missions to Mars on-line here. Malcolm Walter, The Search for Life on Mars (Perseus Books, 1999). Fuel Efficiency (last updated May 1, 2003) (back to top) Federal law requires that all passenger cars manufactured since the early 1980s achieve fuel-economy performances of at least 27.5 miles per gallon. Other automobiles such as sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) are held to lower fuel-economy standards, and the rising popularity of such vehicles has thus contributed to an overall decline in the overall fuel economy of new personal vehicles. SUVs are considered light trucks, and new models of light trucks are currently required to achieve fuel efficiencies of 20.7 miles per gallon (mpg). The Bush administration has proposed gradually increasing the standard to 22.2 mpg by the 2007 model year. Some Democrats support a proposal introduced in January 2003 by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) that would gradually increase the fuel-efficiency standard past the 2007 model year to 27.5 mpg by the 2011 model year, but this proposal is far from becoming law. Car manufacturers whose fleet of vehicles manufactured for sale in the United States fails to meet fuel-economy standards are fined. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that it collected $33 million in such fines in 2001. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the average fuel efficiency of a new passenger car was 28.6 miles per gallon in 2001, while that of a new light truck (such as a SUV) was 20.9 miles per gallon. The number of registered passenger cars increased 3 percent to 137,633 from 1990 to 2001, while the number of other 2-axle, 4-tire vehicles such as SUVs increased 74 percent to 84,188 over the same period. Sources: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a fuel-economy guide available on-line here. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Automotive Fuel Economy program's annual update for 2001 is on-line here. Statistics on the number and average fuel-efficiency of passenger cars and light trucks are taken from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics' National Transportation Statistics 2002, on-line here.

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