Invoking 25th Amendment not way to remove Trump
In the second season of the TV serial drama “24,” President David Palmer declines to order a military strike against several Middle Eastern countries after receiving a tape recording of their officials plotting with a terrorist to build a bomb. Palmer thinks the recording is a fake, and it turns out that he’s right.
But Palmer’s vice president and Cabinet are itching for war, and they decide he is acting “irrationally” by holding his fire. Invoking the 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” they vote Palmer out. He is eventually returned to office, of course, but not before the United States bombs a few places on false pretenses.
OK, so it’s Hollywood. But it also warns us against the casual use of the 25th Amendment, which was designed to protect us against presidents who are disabled rather than against those whom we merely dislike.
And that brings us to President Trump. Ever since he fired FBI director James Comey, raising the specter of obstruction of justice, some critics have started calling for Trump’s impeachment. But others have suggested that Trump might be removed because of his personal qualities, whether he broke the law or not. Trump’s behavior, the argument goes, reveals a human being who simply lacks the capacity to serve as our president.
In a mere four months in office, Trump has likened American intelligence agencies to Nazis. He has derided jurists who ruled against him as “so-called judges.” He has denounced the news media as the “enemy of the American people.” And he has emitted a flurry of insults and falsehoods over Twitter, like a spoiled child with a dangerous toy.
But all of these ugly traits were on full view last fall, when Trump won the presidency. If he’s constitutionally incapable of holding the office now, surely that was the case on Nov. 8 as well. But I didn’t hear his enemies invoke the 25th Amendment back then.
Nor does his behavior — however cruel, immature or bizarre — constitute real evidence of an illness or infirmity, as critics have alleged. And to see why, we need only look back at presidents who were actually disabled.
Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side; his vision was damaged, too, making it difficult or impossible for him to read. During his fourth and final term, Franklin Roosevelt become so enfeebled that he could not bathe or shave himself. He lost weight, his attention span narrowed, and his signature on documents became almost illegible.
Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack and a stroke while in office, telling aides that he was prepared to resign if he couldn’t attend to his duties. But the Constitution didn’t have a provision for removing an infirm president who refused to step down.
That changed after the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. As New York Times columnist James Reston wrote the next day, nobody really knew what would have happened if Kennedy “had lingered for a long time between life and death, strong enough to survive but too weak to govern.”
Hence the 25th Amendment of 1967, which allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to recommend the removal of a president who is unable to function as one. If the president objects, then the House and Senate can confirm the recommendation by a two-thirds vote.
And if you look at the congressional debates over the amendment, it’s clear that it was aimed at presidents who were unmistakably handicapped rather than incompetent or unpopular. In the Senate, New York’s Robert F. Kennedy — the brother of the murdered president — argued that the amendment might become a political weapon to remove any president, for any reason.
Not to worry, replied Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh. “We are not getting into a position ... in which when a president makes an unpopular decision, he would immediately be rendered unable to perform the duties of his office,” said Bayh, the chief author of the 25th Amendment.
Kennedy was still concerned. Would the amendment apply strictly to a president whose “physical or mental inability” made him obviously unfit for the office? Yes, Bayh answered. That was the only acceptable standard: You had to be so clearly and unambiguously disabled that you couldn’t serve out your term.
I challenge anyone to assert — with a straight face — that Donald J. Trump meets that standard. Perhaps the post-Comey investigations will show that Trump colluded with Russia, which could be cause for impeachment. But incapacity is something else altogether. Do we really want to set a precedent where we remove presidents for their infirmities, however ill-defined? Where will that end?
President Trump has run roughshod over some of America’s most cherished civic norms and traditions. Now his enemies are doing the same thing, by invoking an amendment for purposes that its authors expressly renounced.
Go ahead and impeach the guy, if he has done something to deserve that. But stop trying to pretend he’s incapable, when what you really mean is he’s despicable. The entire future of the presidency could hinge on the difference.