The 25th Amendment is to have time.
According to a report by NBC News, more than 70 Democratic congressmen wanted President Donald Trump’s Cabinet to use an obscure constitutional provision that would allow them to temporarily prevent Trump from acting as president, after Trump threatened to do so. wipe out “an entire civilization” in Iran. (Trump has he refrained from the threatat least for now.)
In particular, their call for a 25th Amendment solution was echoed by some voices on the right, including Former US Representative Majorie Taylor Greeneradio announcer Alex Jonesand MAGA lobby Candace Owens.
It is not the first time that the amendment has come. There has been a constant backlash by Trump’s critics calling for it to be implemented throughout his two terms in office, culminating in the days after January 6, 2021, with real negotiations. in his Cabinet and in parliamentary leadership about the process.
As a practical matter, Trump isn’t going anywhere, even if he doesn’t command the near-universal loyalty within his own party that he does now. By international standards, it is very difficult to remove the president of the United States, and more difficult than removing many of our fellow democratic leaders. And the 25th Amendment is not a possible shortcut around this problem, which is rooted in the basic structure of the American government.
How the 25th Amendment works
Let’s cut to the chase: Trump is as likely to be removed via the 25th Amendment as he is to be removed by an army of unicorns.
Although it is theoretically possible to remove Trump from power (or, at least, remove him from power completely) using the amendment, the process of removing him is very difficult, has many points of failure, and requires a lot of bipartisan consensus to be an effective method of removing a president who is just bad at being president, rather than one who is incapable of carrying out his duties.
The 25th Amendment was passed shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and was intended to solve a different problem than the one the United States faces today – what if the president of the United States was still alive, but was physically or mentally incapacitated in a way that prevented him from exercising the powers of the office?
Before the 25th Amendment was passed, the Constitution provided that the vice president would assume the presidency if the president showed “Inability to exercise the Powers and Duties of that Office.” But the original Constitution did not establish a procedure to determine when the president failed to perform his duties. That raised the risk that the president might be unfit to serve, but no one could be sure how to transfer power to the vice president.
The the process laid down in the 25th Amendment isto put it mildly, hard. It allows the vice president to declare the president unfit to serve, provided a majority of the president’s Cabinet officers agree. Once the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet notify Congress that “the President is unable to exercise the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”
But such a declaration cannot be significant if the president still has the ability to cling to power. The 25th Amendment also provides that the president can restore his powers simply by sending his “written declaration of incapacity” to the leaders of the legislature. If that happens, the vice president and the Cabinet can force a congressional vote on whether the president should retain power, but if two-thirds of both houses of Congress disagree that “the President is unable to carry out the powers and duties of his office,” then the president will remain president. And they can’t stop the vote for very long: if Congress doesn’t do anything in 21 days, the president will regain his executive powers.
To even begin the process of removing Trump, in other words, most of Trump’s chosen Cabinet officials (including Vice President JD Vance) would need to agree that he is unfit. Then, when Trump tells Congress that he’s resuming his duties, a supermajority in the U.S. House and Senate — both controlled by Trump’s Republican Party — will have to vote to suspend Vance as acting president.
There it was actually some of the few bilateral talks after the January 6 attack on the Capitol about removing Trump through the 25th Amendment. But Trump was paralyzed with only two weeks left in office at the time, meaning that a Cabinet vote to remove him from office, plus a 21-day deadline in Congress, was possible. run the clock in his presidency.
That would not be possible at this time. Indeed, because the 25th Amendment requires a two-thirds majority both Congress removing Trump against his will is more difficult than the impeachment process, which it only requires a majority vote in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. In 2021, the Senate it could not even get a two-thirds vote remove Trump from power while he was in court by launching a fierce attack against the Senate itself.
Other democracies make it easier to remove an ineffective, ineffective, or unpopular leader
The United States is unusual in that it elects its chief executive separately from its legislature. The United States often elects a Congress that is controlled by a different party than the one that controls the White House. And Congress has only limited power to remove the president – a power it has never used successfully in all of American history.
Compare this system with parliamentary democracies such as Canada, England, Germany, India and Japan. In these systems, the people elect members of parliament, but the parliament elects the leader who will lead the government. The official can also often be removed by a vote of no confidence in parliament, often by a simple majority.
The Founders saw this as an important feature: The executive branch and the legislative branch were expected to each jockey for control to prevent either from consolidating power. But as the late political scientist Juan Linz observed in 1990, presidential democracies such as the United States have proven to be unstablebecause the president and the parliament can be deadlocked on some important issue and both can claim at the same time to have popular authority if such a deadlock occurs. The American system also locks in a president who may have lost the confidence of both Congress and the people, but who nevertheless has the right to serve out their entire term.
One additional advantage of parliamentary democracy is that it allows a political party to remove an ineffective or unpopular leader without creating a political crisis. In 1990, for example, the British Conservatives replaced Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with John Major. remain in power for seven more years under the new leadership. A similar drama played out recently in Canada, where the ruling Liberal party replaced former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with current Prime Minister Mark Carney – allowing Carney to take over. lead the Liberals to another election victory in 2025.
In parliamentary systems, in other words, the removal of the head of state is not an unheard of event that humiliates the outgoing leader and places them in the same class. It is a common political trick that allows the outgoing prime minister to leave power gracefully. Such a system gives political parties an incentive to remove bad leaders.
Meanwhile, the US is about to be stuck with Trump until his term expires in 2029 – even if the Democrats win back both houses of Congress in the next midterm elections, there is no plausible outcome where they win two-thirds of the seats in the Senate. Another new controversy would have to produce almost bipartisan demands for his removal, and frankly it’s not very interesting to imagine what the world looks like in that situation.
