How the 25th Amendment Could Remove the President From Office
The US Constitution contains instructions on how to remove the president from office if he “cannot fulfill his powers and duties.” It could be related to mental illness or serious health problems, but it is now also being discussed as a possible way to remove President Trump from power, as his unsubstantiated claims of widespread electoral fraud incite violence.
Another option would be to impeach the president, who is still in office until noon on January 20, 2021 . Impeachment usually takes time and includes hearings, making it less useful in emergencies, although spokesman Ilhan Omar announced on January 6 that articles of impeachment were being prepared. Here we have more about the impeachment process .
The 25th Amendment includes provisions for the rapid removal of the president. It was ratified in 1967 following the assassination of John F. Kennedy . Up to this point, the methods of transferring power from the president to the vice president have not been specified; the Constitution only vaguely mentions the fact that the president can be removed from office for “inability to fulfill the powers and duties of the said office”.
When can the 25th amendment be applied to the wrong president?
Answer: whenever the vice president and most of the cabinet members are willing to do so. The amendment does not say when the president is unfit for work. He does not point to specific illnesses or cheating, and does not offer any tests . He just talks about it in section 4:
Whenever the Vice President and most of the chief officers of the executive departments or such other body as Congress may provide by law, transmit to the interim President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written statement that the President is unable to exercise his powers and duties, The Vice President immediately assumes the powers and responsibilities of the office as Acting President.
So if that happened today, the Vice President (Mike Pence) and most of the Cabinet members ( these people ) would have to tell the Speaker (Nancy Pelosi) and the Interim Senate President (Chuck Grassley) that they think the President (Donald Trump) must be removed. Once the message is delivered, Pence will become president.
But there is another possibility: it is “such a different body.” Under the 25th Amendment, Congress may pass legislation creating a commission to assess whether the president can fulfill his powers and responsibilities. Nancy Pelosi proposed the formation of such a commission last October after the president diagnosed COVID-19. (Some have dismissed this as a move by the trolls, as the law was unlikely to be passed, but it could be argued that this is a sensible measure during a pandemic.)
The decision of this commission replaces not the final verdict of Congress, but rather a letter from the vice president and cabinet. This means that this body can be used to get things off the ground and get Congress to get together and vote.
What happens next?
At this stage, the president can regain his powers simply by saying that they can now fulfill office duties. It is quite simple if power temporarily passed from the president to a patient or undergoing surgery. But what if the president says that they are all right, but they are not? The rest of Section 4 of the amendment sets the timeline:
- Within four days of the president saying they want their powers back, the vice president and most cabinet members can say they still find the president unfit.
- The Congress must be convened within 48 hours if it has not yet begun work.
- Then Congress has 21 days to decide who to trust.
To remove the president from office, both houses must vote by a two-thirds majority to prevent the president from performing his duties. If they cannot make a decision within 21 days, power returns to the president.
If the president is removed, the vice president becomes president and can appoint a new vice president.
Will this ever happen?
So far, this has never happened. The process of removing the president was designed in such a way that the parties could not willy-nilly select each other’s officials. However, in many ways we are in uncharted territory, so time will tell.
This article was originally published in September 2018, updated in October 2020 in the context of President Trump’s diagnosis of COVID-19, and updated again on January 7, 2021 in the context of the Capitol uprising.