MLK and Saving our Republic in 23 Days

Today is MLK Day 2026. We honor the memory of one of our nation’s greatest leaders ever, who never won an election or earned military brass. Perhaps that intellectual “independence” made him one of our nation’s greatest thinkers ever.

I love King’s memory. I can summon at will the soothing sound of his preternaturally calm, sonorous voice. I can hear him advocating powerfully for “Jobs and Freedom” at the March on Washington in summer 1963. I can marvel at his having predicted, with a brilliant philosopher’s keen insight, exactly what horrors our misguided War in Vietnam would wreak on our nation’s social and economic progress, freedom and equality. (He did this just a year before he was gunned down.) I can miss him as the most noble and selfless of the three victims of assassination in the hellish five years 1963-1968, whose killing by gunfire changed our nation and our world forever, and not for the better.

MLK was a great man in part because he had his head in the clouds and his feet firmly planted on the ground. He was not just a great thinker and a miraculous motivator. He was, at his core, an immensely practical man. Like Gandhi and Mandela, he understood how positive change can come from empathy, understanding and non-violent public pressure. He understood, as much as any of the three, how vital it is to act decisively and at the right time.

That’s why I hope he would forgive me for spending some ink on this, his day, to write again about a practical means to save our Republic and our society from imminent destruction.

We adopted our Constitution’s ponderous and politically fraught impeachment proceedings in 1791. In contrast, we ratified Amendment 25 in 1967, at the height of the Cold War, and we designed it for speed. Advocates for it mentioned all of the following: (1) the need for a quick transition to maintain our nuclear deterrent, (2) the 1963 assassination of JFK, which left the office of vice-president unfilled for fourteen months, (3) Ike’s major heart attack in 1955, followed by abdominal surgery and a stroke, (4) Woodrow Wilson’s near-total incapacitation by a stroke while in office for the final eighteen months of his term, during which his unelected wife ran most of the government; and (5) James A. Garfield’s unconsciousness due to a stroke, for 80 in 1881 days before he died.

In the name of alacrity, Amendment 25 allows the Vice President to remove the President from office and assume the post of acting President immediately, merely by giving, along with “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, . . . [a] written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Unlike the ponderous impeachment process, declared in 1791, Amendment 25 does not require an indictment by the House and conviction by the Senate after trial-like procedures, let alone parsing whatever, in today’s vastly different world, constitutes “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Nor does Amendment 25 require a court or any other formal body to decide whether Donald Trump’s increasing senile dementia, malignant narcissism and/or other derangements constitute an “inability” as did the strokes, comas, heart attacks, major surgeries, and consequent failures of consciousness of past presidents. All Amendment 25 requires is that the Vice President and a majority of executive officers declare in writing the President’s “inability” to carry on his duties. If the President objects by his own written declaration, the decision goes to Congress, which must uphold the Vice President’s declaration of inability by a two-thirds vote in both Houses, else it fails.

Congress must decide within 23 days of the Vice President’s declaration—48 hours for notification plus 21 days for action. And its decision is not restrained by legal niceties or procedures; it can be as practical or political as reality demands. Thus Amendment 25 recognizes and incorporates modern realities: the world’s still most indispensable nation cannot remain practically paralyzed by failures of flesh for even as long as a month.

Would JD Vance’s declaration of Trump’s “inability” garner the support of a majority of Trump’s own Cabinet? The probability is growing by the minute, as Cabinet members see, at close hand, hard evidence of Trump’s “inability.” The evidence includes rambling, incoherent tirades, a constant, needy focus on himself, his inability to express a coherent thought other than his own greatness and his need for retribution against perceived opponents, and his willingness to kill people, both abroad and in our homeland, for vague and often incoherent objectives. Cabinet members’ perceptions of “inability” grow also as each sees the probability of having freer rein, under JD Vance as president, to make coherent and effective policy more to his or her own liking.

Congress may be a tougher nut to crack. Republican members are more distant from Trump and his madness than Cabinet members. To save their political skins, many have developed a reflexive subservience that may take time to reconsider. A massive Democratic landslide in this year’s midterm elections may be needed to wake them up.

As for JD Vance as President, it’s difficult to predict what he might do as acting President. But he’s a mere 41 years old, far from senility. His wife is of Indian heritage and a practicing Hindi, suggesting at least that he is not, like Trump and legions of the MAGA faithful, a white or Christian supremacist. Vance is also a graduate of Yale Law School with an apparently good record, while Trump has taken extraordinary measures to ensure that his college grades and standardized test scores remain secret.

MLK knew how to take a calculated risk. He did so, with his own life and body, in organizing and leading the famous “March for Freedom” across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. He also took a risk, with extraordinary results, in organizing the 1963 March on Washington and making his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech. His whole life proved to be a calculated risk, ending with his own assassination (which he himself had predicted) in 1968.

As I love Dr. King’s memory, I believe he would take the calculated risk of invoking Amendment 25. Of course he would choose the most auspicious time, probably waiting for a Democratic victory in the midterms.

But I have high confidence that he would not fail to use this clear constitutional mechanism to remove a chief executive who is demonstrably destroying what’s left of the Western Enlightenment, along with our nation’s commitment to racial and ethnic equality, our international prestige and support, our once-globe-leading economy, our last remaining chance to stem planetary heating, and our prospects of saving our allies, including Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Europe, from the ravages of emboldened Russia, China and Iran.