A Better Plan Than Pelosi’s: Repeal the 25th Amendment

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

It’s starting to look like the states never should have ratified the 25th Amendment to begin with. At least not the part that deals with a dysfunctional president. Certainly it’s hard to imagine a scheme more nefarious than the one that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is advancing. In one of those crises the Democrats don’t like to let go to waste, it would turn over the task of removing an elected president to a panel of — wait for it — psychiatrists.

Mrs. Pelosi’s plan has nothing to do with President Trump’s case of Covid, contrary to what she suggested in her mincing press conference on Thursday. She suggested the idea was precipitated by the President’s bout of Covid leaving him in an altered state. On Friday, though, she fetched up with the bill a congressman from Maryland, Jamie Raskin, has been nursing. We call it the “Et Tu, Brute! Enablement Act.”

Mr. Rankin’s bill — he’s been nursing it since 2017 — would pick up an unused power granted to Congress in the 25th Amendment. The amendment allows for the temporary removal of the president if the vice president plus a majority of the cabinet declares he’s unable to discharge his duties. The veep and the cabinet majority just have to transmit that declaration to the Speaker and the president pro-tem of the Senate. If two-thirds of each house agrees, the president can be indefinitely sidelined.

By requiring that the vice president get backing from a majority of the cabinet, the amendment has a built-in protection for the president. It’s the president, after all, who names the cabinet in the first place. The 25th, though, has an option. Instead of the cabinet, the vice president could get a majority “of such other body as Congress may by law provide.” The Pelosi-Rankin bill would, for the first time, create such a body.

The New York Sun flies the flag that flew over the newspaper for which Rube Goldberg drew his famous cartoon contraptions. Even Rube, though, would have a hard time matching Mr. Raskin’s “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of the Office.” There’s a nifty précis on Vox. The commission would comprise 17 members, nine of them physicians, including four psychiatric specialists.

In other words, no longer would the president serve at the pleasure of the people. His job could hang on the say-so of a bunch of psychiatrists. We have nothing against these noble comrades. Vesting them with political power, though, strikes us as crazy, even if the Pelosi-Rankin commission were, as the bill suggests, bipartisan. No wonder President Trump sprang on Mrs. Pelosi’s 25th Amendment scheme.

It’s as clear as the day you were born, after all, that this can’t get passed in time to deal with President Trump’s case of the coronavirus or his jolt of whatever medicine he was on, as Mrs. Pelosi falsely suggested. Mr. Trump reckons it’s really about Joe Biden, who could prove to be so frail and incoherent as to fall prey to a Pelosi-Rankin commission. “Kamala Harris,” the Wall Street Journal notes, “has that lean and hungry look.”

It happens that back in the summer of 1965, when Congress was working on what became the 25th Amendment, there arose in the Senate something of a squall over all this. One can gain a glimpse of it in the Congressional Record of the day. The consternation arose from the insertion, late in the game, of language letting the vice president work with a majority of either the cabinet or a new body created by Congress.

This was a concern of, among others, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, the future anti-war figure. The option of a congressional commission worried him. As, apparently, it did Albert Gore Sr. (father of Vice President Gore). “I submit,” Gore pere rumbled at one point, “that under the proposed amendment one might assume or claim the power of the Presidency, not without doubt but under a cloud of doubt.”

“A President,” Gore warned at one point, “might be physically fit — the picture of health; but to those who work closely with him, there might be a conviction that he had lost his mental balance, that he had psychiatric problems. In such an event, the country could be rent asunder by political passions.” Yet the Senate let the 25th Amendment pass. It is starting to look like the best use of the current crisis would be to start the process of repeal.

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Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.


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