Wilson’s own cabinet lacked guidance on an ever-growing stack of executive actions. So did senators, about to debate the treaty that could bring the United States into the League of Nations-a cause the president championed above all others. The information-starved public wanted more. Nothing substantial was revealed that day, nor during the next couple of months, about the cause, Wilson’s prognosis, or courses of treatment. This statement from Woodrow Wilson’s physician on October 3, 1919, told the world two truths about the president: his illness was serious, and he would be out of contact for a while. “The President is a very sick man,” the doctor’s bulletin announced, and “absolute rest is essential for some time.”
The Cabinet only matters in the latter case-and only if the vice president is also willing to take the dramatic step. Despite all the chattering about lining up Cabinet secretaries, the amendment requires either Donald Trump or Mike Pence to make the determination of inability (via, respectively, its Section 3 voluntary transfer of power or its Section 4 involuntary transfer of power).
That allows the president to voluntarily empower the vice president to act as president for a designated period of time, just like past presidents have temporarily transferred their powers to the vice president when undergoing anesthesia for medical procedures.” And the anonymous senior government official who in September wrote the “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” op-ed in The New York Times admitted “early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president.”īut most of this speculation about the saving grace of the 25th Amendment misses an important element that makes its application extremely unlikely.
“Now if the obligations of mounting a legal defense truly became too time-consuming for Trump,” Obeidallah wrote, “there’s an easy remedy: the 25th Amendment.
But it was far from the first-and certainly won’t be the last-speculation about using the “removal for disability” amendment to separate President Trump from the powers and duties of the office.ĭean Obeidallah wrote for The Daily Beast earlier this year that the 25th Amendment might be a way around the Department of Justice’s current guidance that a sitting president cannot be indicted. This fall, The New York Times reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had raised with Justice Department and FBI officials back in 2017 the possibility of declaring Donald Trump unable to serve as president via the 25th Amendment-specifically, saying that he might prove able to persuade then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to mount this effort.
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