To the Editor:

Re “Nancy Pelosi Should Not Be President,” by Jesse Wegman (Editorial Observer, Nov. 4):

Mr. Wegman has identified a genuine problem in our political system: It is extraordinarily unwise, and even politically dangerous, to place the speaker and the president pro tem of the Senate in the line of succession, given the real possibility that they are not from the president’s own party.

As Mr. Wegman accurately points out, there is also a completely serious (and I believe persuasive) argument that the Presidential Succession Act is unconstitutional, even if it is almost impossible to imagine a federal court actually evicting a speaker who becomes president.

There is no excuse for the failure to pass bipartisan corrective legislation, ideally co-sponsored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the president pro tem, Charles Grassley. If passed in the next few weeks, it would actually give us something to be grateful for at Thanksgiving!

Sanford Levinson

Brookline, Mass.

The writer, a professor at the University of Texas Law School, is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and co-author of “Fault Lines in the Constitution.”