Scott calls on Cabinet to remove Biden
Democrats say he’s playing to GOP base
Sen. Rick Scott has for days been calling on the vice president and Cabinet to remove President Biden under the 25th Amendment, echoing a longstanding right-wing conspiracy theory about Biden’s mental capacity.
“I do not say this lightly,” wrote Scott, who serves as the Senate Republican campaign chair, in a Fox News article Friday. “The Office of President of the United States is the most powerful in the world and it demands total accountability. If President Biden can no longer competently lead, the president, his Cabinet, and the American people know what must be done.”
Florida Democrats blasted Scott’s comments, with spokesman Jose Parra calling them “a transparent and cheap attempt at creating a [way] to raise funds and also to burnish his reputation with the base. And nothing else. This doesn’t go beyond that.”
Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, said Vice President Kamala Harris and a Cabinet of Biden loyalists are unlikely to listen to Scott.
“I don’t know exactly his motives, but part of it is probably to just get some press,” Jewett said. “There’s some thought that he wants to run for president. … Gov. [Ron] DeSantis has been getting lots of press coverage. Lots of Republicans have been talking about him. So perhaps this is one way to draw some national media attention.”
Scott had already called Biden “Incompetent. Unhinged. Incoherent [and] Unfit” in a tweet earlier this week and said in another tweet that “it’s clear that we must ask the serious question of whether Joe
Biden is fit to lead our nation as commander in chief.”
But Scott went further on Friday, openly calling on the Vice President and Cabinet to “consider the 25th Amendment.” The amendment, passed in 1967, lays out a process that could lead them to decide the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and install the vice president as acting president.
It has so far only been invoked by presidents themselves to hand over power temporarily during surgery with an anesthetic. U.S. Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Orlando, and other Democrats had called for former President Trump to be removed via the 25th Amendment after Trump’s incitement of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, for which he was later impeached.
Scott, like many Republicans and some Democrats, has been critical of the Biden administration’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, which resulted in the
Taliban taking over the country much quicker than U.S. intelligence expected. But Scott went further.
“I hope our president is ok,” Scott wrote in the Fox article. “I hope he is strong and healthy enough, at this crucial time, for this critical job . ... We must discern whether this is incompetence on the part of his administration, or something far more serious. The American people deserve answers and, frankly, to know whether this president is truly fit to still lead the United States.”
Asked for comment, Scott’s office cited the article.
Questioning Biden’s mental capacity has been an ongoing conspiracy theory in right-wing media, with speakers at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas this summer calling the president “senile” to applause from the crowd.
Trump also frequently implied that Biden was suffering from dementia, a strategy that some experts said backfired in lowering expectations for Biden’s debate performance. Trump has defended his own mental capacity against similar allegations, repeatedly citing a “difficult” cognitive test he said he “aced.”
“Trump himself endorsed the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and was actually advocating for a much quicker timetable there than that,” Jarra said. “We didn’t hear a peep from Rick Scott back then.”
Jewett said Scott could be accused of hypocrisy in attacking Biden while not criticizing Trump for his behavior after the election when the former president falsely claimed widespread fraud and incited the Capitol attack. Scott voted to reject the result of the election in Pennsylvania, a key swing state, later that day.
“Okay. Afghanistan didn’t turn out like you liked it,” Jewett said. “The 25th amendment really is not supposed to be about just policy disagreements.”