You know, this brings to mind something that has been bugging me a bit over time. Since the categories can be taken down at will, why not have a "General Discussion 2" and a "Legal and Political 2" section?
These could be brought online ONLY during an outage affecting the primary categories. NO ARCHIVED discussion in them, and all active discussions could be moved over to the "regular" ones when they come back online.
Just a thought.