On This Day: July 10, 1850 — On July 4, President Zachary Taylor had stood through hours of Independence Day ceremonies at the unfinished Washington Monument under a punishing summer sun, then reportedly cooled off with a large helping of cherries and iced milk. Within days he was gripped by a violent stomach illness that the physicians of the era could neither diagnose nor treat, and by the evening of July 9 the twelfth president of the United States was dead, sixteen months into his term. Vice President Millard Fillmore took the oath the next morning, July 10, becoming the second man in less than a decade to inherit the presidency from a chief executive who never lived to finish it. There was no vice president standing by with advance briefings, no committee of doctors issuing daily bulletins, no transition period at all. The Constitution’s succession clause simply worked, transferring the full power of the executive branch in a single day, without a vote being cast or a crisis being manufactured.
That same question, of what a republic does when the person holding power no longer can, runs through nearly every story below. An Iranian plot to assassinate a sitting president raises it in its starkest form. A senator’s unexplained hospitalization raises it more quietly, but no less urgently. A Senate candidate’s sudden withdrawal raises it in miniature, as does a federal commission that abruptly finds itself with no one left to run it. The Framers spent real effort making sure the answer to “who is in charge now” would never depend on secrecy, improvisation, or the goodwill of whoever happened to be standing nearest the levers of power. This week tested that design from several directions at once.
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🎯 Israel Warns U.S. of Fresh Iranian Plot to Kill Trump as Tehran Mourners Chant for His Death
Israel recently shared intelligence with the United States indicating that Iran has developed a new plan to assassinate President Trump, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing people familiar with the matter. The reported plot would mark an escalation of the threats Iran has leveled against Trump since the 2020 strike that killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani, threats Tehran has renewed repeatedly since the two countries went to war in February.
Trump addressed the threat directly on Wednesday, telling reporters he is on “every single” Iranian target list and that the country must “root out that cancer” of terrorism before it spreads further. Mourners at the funeral of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were seen carrying a banner reading “We Will Kill Trump,” underscoring how openly the threat has been voiced even as Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone Thursday and agreed to keep coordinating on the fragile ceasefire following last month’s U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
The Founders built the presidency as a single, continuous office precisely because they understood that foreign adversaries would look for any opening created by a leadership vacuum, and the Constitution’s succession clause exists to close that opening before it can be exploited. A hostile foreign power plotting to kill an American president is not merely a personal threat to Trump; it is an attack on the constitutional order itself, aimed at the very continuity of government the Framers worked to guarantee.
🗳️ Platner Drops Out of Maine Senate Race After Sexual Assault Allegation, Leaving Democrats Scrambling
Graham Platner ended his campaign for Maine’s U.S. Senate seat on Wednesday, days after a woman he had previously dated accused him of sexually assaulting her in 2021, an allegation Platner has denied even as he acknowledged the weight it had placed on his candidacy. His exit leaves Maine Democrats without a nominee to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins, and under state law the party now has until July 27 to select a replacement through a nominating convention.
Platner’s withdrawal came only after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee warned bluntly that the national party would not spend a dollar on the race if he stayed on the ballot, and after nearly every prominent Democrat who had endorsed him, including several who stood by him through an earlier controversy over a Nazi-associated tattoo, rescinded their support within hours. Several Democrats have already announced bids to replace him, including former state Senate President Troy Jackson and former gubernatorial candidate David Costello, while the state party has committed to a transparent convention process to pick a nominee before its deadline.
Maine’s compressed replacement window is exactly the kind of ballot-mechanics decision the Constitution leaves to the states, and the speed with which Platner’s own allies abandoned him once the allegation surfaced shows the accountability the Founders expected from a free press and an engaged electorate working as intended. A party that cannot govern its own nominating process in an orderly, transparent way has no business asking voters to trust it with governing anything larger.
⚖️ Kirk Shooting Suspect’s Roommate Testifies He “Wished He Hadn’t Done It,” as Judge Weighs What the Public Gets to See
Tyler Robinson, the man Utah prosecutors say assassinated Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk, returned to his apartment the day after the shooting and told his roommate and romantic partner, Lance Twiggs, that he “wished he hadn’t done it,” according to a recorded interview played in a Utah courtroom Thursday during the fourth day of Robinson’s preliminary hearing. Twiggs testified that Robinson paced anxiously around their shared apartment, said little else about the shooting itself, and eventually told Twiggs he planned to confess to his parents or turn himself in, which he did later that same day.
Prosecutors allege Robinson left Twiggs a note reading that he had “the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk” and was “going to take it,” and that text messages between the two included Robinson’s claim he had “enough of his hatred” for Kirk. Judge Tony Graf ordered portions of Twiggs’s interview redacted before it was played publicly, prompting objections from attorneys for Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, who argued that the family and the public deserve to see the full evidence being used to determine whether Robinson stands trial for a killing carried out in front of thousands of witnesses at Utah Valley University.
Open, adversarial proceedings conducted where the public and the press can see them are precisely the safeguard the Sixth Amendment was written to guarantee, both for a defendant facing the government’s full weight and for a grieving family entitled to know what happened to their own. A political assassination carried out against a prominent conservative commentator is the kind of event a self-governing people cannot be asked to simply take on faith; it has to be proven, in the open, according to the rules the Constitution lays down.
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📊 Polling Snapshot: The Political Landscape
- President Trump Job Approval: Approve 40.8% | Disapprove 56.6% — a 15.8-point deficit in the RealClearPolling average, tracking closely with Trump’s 40.5% favorable and 55.5% unfavorable rating heading into the fall midterms (RealClearPolling)
🏔️ Victor Marx Wins Colorado’s GOP Governor Primary in a Photo Finish, Setting Up a Fight for the State’s First Republican Governor in Two Decades
Victor Marx, a first-time candidate and self-described missionary, won Colorado’s three-way Republican primary for governor on Thursday, more than a week after polls closed, edging out state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer by less than a percentage point after the Associated Press called the race with Marx ahead by roughly 2,500 votes, a margin narrow enough to avoid an automatic recount under state law. State Rep. Scott Bottoms finished a distant third.
Marx, a 61-year-old Marine veteran who built a large national following recounting his work rescuing women and children abroad, ran a campaign built more on personal story than policy detail, sidestepping many of the debates and forums that typically shape a primary. His nomination survived a viral moment in which he refused to answer a television anchor’s question about how many people he has killed during his overseas work, and Kirkmeyer, the establishment favorite who had the backing of a former governor and a sitting congressman, notably declined to endorse him after conceding. Marx will face Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser in November, in a state where Republicans have not won a statewide race since 2016.
Whatever one makes of Marx’s unconventional path to the nomination, competitive primaries decided by voters rather than party gatekeepers are exactly the mechanism the Founders trusted to test a candidate before the general electorate ever sees the name on a ballot. Colorado Republicans now have a nominee chosen through open contest rather than backroom anointment, and it will be up to the voters in November, not pundits in June, to decide whether that choice was the right one.
🗂️ Trump Fires Entire Election Assistance Commission, Leaving the Federal Election Agency With No One Left to Run It
President Trump fired all three remaining commissioners of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission this week, an action that leaves the only federal agency dedicated solely to election administration unable to take official action until new commissioners are confirmed. Democratic commissioners Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland were notified by email that their positions were “terminated, effective immediately,” while Republican commissioner Christy McCormick was permitted to resign.
The firings come days after the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that the president may remove leaders of independent agencies, a decision that weakened decades of precedent shielding bipartisan commissions from direct White House control, though the justices carved out a separate exception for the Federal Reserve’s historical independence. The Election Assistance Commission does not run elections itself; it distributes federal election funds, maintains the national voter registration form, and certifies the voting equipment many states rely on before purchase. By law, commissioners must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, with no more than two from the same party, meaning the agency could remain frozen for months heading into the 2026 midterms.
Congress created the Election Assistance Commission as a bipartisan body precisely so that no single administration could bend election administration to its own advantage, an arrangement very much in keeping with the Founders’ preference for checks that survive any one officeholder’s ambitions. An agency built for balance between the parties works only for as long as both parties actually have a seat at the table, and a commission with zero commissioners left standing cannot balance anything at all.
🏥 Beshear Presses McConnell for a Health Update as Kentucky’s Untested Succession Law Waits in the Wings
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear sent a formal letter to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office this week requesting a full update on the 84-year-old senator’s health, as McConnell’s hospitalization stretched into its fourth week with few details offered beyond assurances that he is “recovering” and “receiving excellent care.” Beshear, a Democrat, wrote that Kentuckians “have grown increasingly concerned” about McConnell’s wellbeing and his “ability to hold office in the United States Senate.”
The request lands atop a 2024 Kentucky law, passed over Beshear’s veto, that strips the governor of any power to appoint a temporary senator and instead requires a special election to fill a vacancy, a process that has never once been tested and carries no firm statutory deadline for the governor to set it in motion. McConnell, who is not seeking reelection this year, has missed Senate votes on defense spending and other priorities during his absence, and emergency dispatch audio previously reported by multiple outlets described a possible cardiac arrest and CPR in progress the day he was hospitalized, details his office has neither confirmed nor denied.
Kentucky Republicans wrote that succession law specifically to prevent a Democratic governor from filling a Senate seat by appointment, and whatever one thinks of the politics behind it, the law itself reflects a very old, very sound instinct: that the manner of replacing a lawmaker who cannot serve should be settled by statute in advance, not improvised in a crisis by whichever official happens to hold the appointment power at the moment. The Tenth Amendment leaves that choice to the states for exactly this reason, and Kentucky’s answer, untested as it is, at least has the virtue of having been decided before anyone needed to use it.
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🔍 Who Is In Charge Now
When Zachary Taylor died on the evening of July 9, 1850, the government of the United States did not pause to figure out what came next. Millard Fillmore, who had spent sixteen unremarkable months as vice president with little expectation of ever occupying the office he was about to inherit, took the oath the following morning. There was no announcement of a health scare weeks in advance, no committee of physicians briefing the public, no ambiguity about who held the authority of the presidency once Taylor’s heart stopped. The Constitution’s succession clause, drafted by men who had watched monarchies collapse into civil war over exactly this question, simply did its job. Fillmore was president, in full, by the next sunrise.
This week’s news kept circling back to that same underlying question: what happens, constitutionally and practically, when the person holding power no longer can hold it, whether by force, by illness, by scandal, or by design. The reported Iranian plot against President Trump is the starkest version, a foreign adversary calculating that removing one man might unravel American resolve entirely. It is worth remembering that the Framers built the presidency as an office rather than a person for precisely this reason. Kill the office holder and the office itself survives, seamlessly, by operation of law rather than by the goodwill of whoever seizes the moment.
Sen. Mitch McConnell’s prolonged and largely unexplained hospitalization raises the same question in a quieter key. Gov. Andy Beshear’s letter asking for a health update was itself an appeal to a constitutional norm, the idea that officeholders owe their constituents enough transparency to judge whether they remain fit to serve. Kentucky’s 2024 succession law exists precisely so that if McConnell cannot continue, no one has to improvise an answer under pressure. The law may be untested, but its existence before the crisis, rather than during it, is the whole point.
Graham Platner’s exit from the Maine Senate race shows a version of succession built entirely around a deadline rather than a death. Maine law gives Democrats until July 27 to replace him, a hard boundary set in calm times that now has to bear the weight of a chaotic moment, exactly as Kentucky’s law was written for. The Election Assistance Commission’s sudden loss of every sitting commissioner is different still: a body designed for bipartisan balance now has no one left to balance, a vacancy created not by tragedy or scandal but by presidential order, testing how far the removal power the Supreme Court recently expanded can reach into agencies Congress built to survive any one administration.
Scripture recorded an early version of this same problem. After Judas’s betrayal and death left a gap among the twelve apostles, the remaining disciples did not simply carry on shorthanded. Acts describes them gathering, setting criteria for who could serve, and casting lots to choose Matthias, restoring the number before moving forward. Even the earliest church understood that legitimate authority requires an orderly process for replacing those who fall away, not an assumption that the mission can proceed indefinitely with an empty chair at the table.
John Adams, drafting the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780, insisted that the new government be “a government of laws and not of men,” a phrase written specifically to guard against exactly the vacuum this week’s stories all describe in different forms. Whether the vacancy is created by an assassin’s bullet, a hospital bed, a scandal, or a stroke of a pen, the American system was built to answer the question of who is in charge without ever having to ask a single man for permission to find out. Two hundred and seventy-six years after Millard Fillmore took an oath nobody expected him to take, that design is still doing exactly the job it was built for.
“A government of laws, and not of men.”
— John Adams, Massachusetts Constitution, Part the First, Article XXX, 1780
Question: President Zachary Taylor died in office on July 9, 1850, after falling ill in the days following Fourth of July festivities in Washington. His vice president was sworn in as his successor the very next day, July 10, 1850. Who was that thirteenth president of the United States?
A. Millard Fillmore
B. John Tyler
C. Franklin Pierce
D. James K. Polk