The Simple Math of Amendment 25

The Midterm elections just concluded reflect the most massive repudiation of an American president in over half a century. Trump was right the first time: he was on the ballot.

And well he should have been. Not only has his Administration shown the greatest cruelty to hapless refugees in America since the Chinese exclusion laws a century ago. It has run up a national debt of forty trillion dollars, just to keep the grotesquely rich among us from paying their fair share of taxes. (Recall that the top rate of personal taxation under President and formerly General Eisenhower was 92%.)

In the process, Trump has helped produce the world’s first trillionaire, a testosterone- and drug-fueled white-supremacist refugee from South Africa named Elon Musk. Trump made Musk—a man never elected or even formally appointed to any public office—a de facto member of his administration. Musk returned the favor by helping decimate our economy and our medical research and scientific research establishments at home and abroad. All the while, Trump has been so mindless as to profess (apparently sincerely) that tariffs are paid by the nations and people on whose goods we assess them when those goods cross our borders.

But the damage that Trump has done to our economy and our economic fairness at home pales in comparison with what he has done to our international standing and political/military security. He has alienated all of our closest allies, from Canada, through the UK, France and Germany, to the rest of the EU and Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. And he has done so in part with childish taunts unworthy of a junior-high-school playground. He has played footsie with the worst dictators and would-be-dictators on the planet, including Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Jair Bolsonaro (and recently his son Flavio), and sometimes even Xi Jinping.

Worst of all, he has depleted our stockpile of essential munitions, especially Patriot missiles, which once formed the backbone of our homeland defense (and our allies’). In the process, he grossly weakened Ukraine's defense against an unprovoked Russian invasion, merely because Ukraine’s leader Zelenskyy displeased him. He did all this, presumably, in full knowledge that it will take years to replenish that stockpile and perhaps years more to provide an effective AI-coordinated drone substitute on which our military suppliers should have been working for a decade or more now.

And how did Trump maintain his power during all this dismal time? As a classic demagogue, in the mold of Caesar, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. He worked hard (and quite successfully) to get us Americans to hate and fear each other, fomenting popular revulsion at virtually all immigrants except those from Norway and South Africa. And recently he even maligned those from Norway, saying in an October 25 rally, “I didn't get the Nobel Prize. . . So I don’t want anybody from Norway . . . . I don't want anything to do with Norway.”

It would be bad enough if Trump had a plan. But he doesn’t and never did. His only discernible “plan” is to enrich himself, his family and his cronies, while allowing a great nation to decay into division, weakness and (in research, medicine, and science) idleness and irrelevance. And even his self-enrichment is random and haphazard, relying on things like gifts of a plane from an Arab potentate and “deals” for his family involving crypto and plans for bizarre luxury resorts, including one in Albania.

We all know how the Roman Senate dealt with Julius Caesar as demagogue, who was a smarter and better man than Trump in every way. (Caesar personally led Roman troops in conquering “Gaul,” including most of today’s France and Spain. He wrote an unghosted book about that military campaign, which is still read today, two millennia later. But Caesar had the same supreme ego as Trump, as evidenced by his most famous quotation from that book: “Veni, vidi, vici. (I came, I saw, I conquered.)”

Today we don’t need senators’ violence to protect our nation from a self-serving, demented tyrant. We have Amendment 25. We adopted it in large part for precisely the present circumstance: in which a president has “lost it” as a result of rapidly increasing and self-evident senile dementia. We adopted it because we recognized that, in the fast pace of the twenty-first century, a president’s disability, whether physical or mental, could be catastrophic. We could no longer tolerate what happened after Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, when his un-elected wife effectively ran the government for several months.

Our Constitution has a lower age limit (of 35) for presidents, but no upper limit. The reason is historical. In 1791, people in general were lucky to live past 50. They died of physical causes or disease long before they could reach senility.

Not so today. Today many people—especially those in the upper regions of the socio-economic spectrum—rountinely live into their eighties, nineties and even hundreds. Unfortunately, at those ages brains tend to deteriorate as fast or faster than bodies. Just recall Joe Biden’s deer-in-the-headlights debate performance that cost him the presidency and maybe us our Republic.

Enter Amendment 25, specifically Section 4 of it. It was drafted and designed for just this problem. Unlike the impeachment process, which is part of our original Constitution, Section 4 creates a removal-for-disability process that is designed to be quick, simple and (unlike impeachment) devoid of lengthy legal proceedings.

If the Vice President believes that the President is disabled (i.e., “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”), he so certifies to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Then the Vice President “shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

If the President disagrees (and has the capacity to do so), he can submit a counter-certification of “no inability” and immediately reassume his job as president, unless the Vice President, within four days, resubmits a declaration of disability, this time backed up by “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide[.]” In that event, Congress must assemble within 48 hours and must, within 21 days if then in session or 23 if not, decide the issue. A vote of two-thirds of both Houses is required to allow the Vice President to continue to serve as Acting President, presumably until the President’s disability subsides or his usual term ends.

Section 4’s spare language is clear. It makes no provision for expert testimony or extended legal proceedings. On the contrary, it is designed for alacrity and speed. It relies on the sincere, good-faith judgment of the Vice President, a majority of Cabinet members and two-thirds of the members of each House of Congress. Thus, Section 4 remits the question of a president’s disability to the judgment of the officers with whom the president works most intimately, as well as the supermajority judgment of the first branch of government.

How would Section 4 work today? Let’s start with the congressional math, which seems the greatest hurdle, in general, to removing a president from active duty. The House of Representatives has 435 voting seats. Two-thirds of that number is 290 precisely. As a result of the midterm elections, the major news outlets estimate that Democrats will hold from 253 to 259 of them and Republicans correspondingly 182 and 176. If every Democrat votes to remove Trump and install JD Vance, and none votes otherwise on the theory that an increasingly demented Trump will produce an even greater Democratic landslide in 2028 (i.e., none puts party over country), removal will require only 31 to 37 Republican votes, or about one out of five.

I wouldn’t call that a slam dunk, but it’s pretty close. I suppose that at least that many Republicans secretly despise Trump and what he has done to their party and our country and would like to begin the process of cleansing and renewal of both ASAP, if only to give the GOP a decent chance of reviving before the 2028 presidential election.

The vote in the Senate would be similar but perhaps closer. The Dems are assured 54 seats in the 100-seat Senate, and maybe 56 if Peltola and Collum win their Senate races in Alaska and Mississippi (Mississippi!) respectively. So a two-thirds vote would require only 11 to 13 Republican Senators to join, less than one third of the expected Republican complement.

All this seems eminently doable, at least if Senators of both parties are realistic and put their country’s future ahead of their party’s. (Given the likely advancing deterioration of the president’s mental capacity, a vote to retain him would likely harm their own personal political fortunes, especially if the vote to retain him were close.)

So, upon cold, sober analysis, it seems that all that stands between us, the people, and getting rid of the worst president in our history before he deteriorates further is getting a majority of the Cabinet to sign on. (JD Vance’s world-class opportunism would likely make him jump at the chance to become Acting President after only two years as a Senator (Ohio) and two years as VP. And JD Vance, despite questions about his moral compass, or whether he even has one, is clearly in full possession of his intellectual capacity. I suppose he even understands how tariffs work!)

According to Google AI, the relevant Cabinet offices and the people currently holding them are fifteen, listed by office and current office holder here [scroll to end of long thread]. All it would require to remove Trump would be the assent of a majority of them, or eight.

As far as I can tell, only a handful are so obviously unqualified and so obviously self-seeking that they would (a) assess their chances of keeping their jobs on merit alone as near zero and (b) be selfish and heedless enough to put their continuing in office above the health of the nation (literally, in RKF, Jr.’s case). Those self-seekers are: Hegseth at Defense, Blanche as AG, McMahon at Education, RFK, Jr. at HHS, and Mullin at DHS. That leaves a three-“vote” margin before diluting the eight votes required to deny Vance a Cabinet majority. The other ten officials could reasonably expect to serve (and maybe even serve well!) in their current positions under a younger, smarter and non-senile Acting President Vance.

So shall we get on with it, at least as the clock runs out on the current Congress? Shall we at least try to put and end to this darkest political period in our nation’s quarter-millennial history? Nothing inspires fear and dread more than an increasingly demented Trump’s fingers wistfully hovering over The Button for two more long years!