Myrtle Beach, SC
Before anybody answers this, read Section 4, because the mechanism people are demanding does not work the way they think.
Section 4 requires the Vice President. Not a majority of the Cabinet acting alone — the Vice President and a majority of the principal officers. Her signature comes first and without it nothing happens at all.
So the person who would have had to initiate a capacity proceeding against Joe Biden in 2023 was Kamala Harris. The woman on his ticket, whose entire political position depended on him, who would have been accused within about ninety seconds of engineering her own promotion, and who would have had to do it against a president whose staff she did not control.
That is not a coup objection. It is an operational one, and it is why the section has never been used in fifty-seven years despite several presidents who plainly qualified at some point.
I work in marketing and I know a product that cannot ship when I see one. Section 4 is designed for a president in a coma or after a stroke — an event, sudden and undeniable, where the Vice President and the Cabinet can all see the same thing on the same afternoon. It is not designed for slow decline in a man who is lucid at ten in the morning and lost at seven at night, which is the actual clinical picture everybody has been describing.
So the answer to the question as posed is that they should have talked about capacity in public and that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was never the tool for it. The tool was the party, which controls a nomination and needs nobody’s signature but its own.
That tool was available the entire time. It was used this month, in a panic, three weeks before a convention. It could have been used in early 2023 with a calendar and a debate stage.
Coup is the wrong word for either option. The right words are early and late, and they chose late.
Novi, MI
A shop that wants a corrective action should first check whether the procedure it is invoking exists.
Congressional Democrats cannot invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. They have no role in starting it. None. Section 4 is triggered by the Vice President and a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments, and Congress enters only if the President contests the declaration — at which point it needs a two-thirds vote of both houses to keep the Vice President in charge.
Two-thirds of both houses. In this Congress that is 290 in the House and 67 in the Senate, with a Republican majority in one chamber and a fifty-one-seat Democratic majority in the other.
Run the sequence. The Vice President and Cabinet declare. Biden transmits a declaration that no inability exists — which he obviously would, having spent this month insisting he is fine. He resumes his powers immediately unless the Vice President and Cabinet re-declare within four days. Then Congress has twenty-one days and needs a two-thirds vote in both chambers.
It would have failed. Not narrowly. It would not have come close in either chamber, and the result would have been a four-day transfer followed by the powers going straight back, with the President restored and every signatory finished.
In process terms that is a control with a documented failure rate of one hundred percent under the conditions in which anyone would want to use it. You do not build a corrective action around it.
So the demand that these people should have invoked the Twenty-Fifth is a demand that they run a procedure guaranteed to fail and destroy them. The demand that they should have talked about capacity in public is different and I would grant it entirely.
The lever that actually worked was the nomination, and it belongs to the party, and it required no constitutional provision at all. It got pulled this month. It could have been pulled in early 2023 on a schedule instead of in July on a phone chain.
Orange County, CA
Orange County can read a governing document, so let me point out the thing that makes most of this week’s commentary beside the point.
Section 4 does not remove anybody. It transfers the powers and duties temporarily to the Vice President as Acting President. The man remains President. He remains in office. And — this is the part that matters for the question — he remains the nominee.
There is no line in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment that touches a party’s ballot. The nomination is not a constitutional object. It is a private association’s decision about whose name goes on a form in fifty states, and no amount of Cabinet paperwork affects it.
So the question sets up a choice between two things that were never alternatives. A Section 4 proceeding would have produced a temporary transfer of executive authority and a President who was still on the ticket. The thing everybody actually wanted — a different nominee — required the party, not the Constitution.
In finance we would call that a category error in the instrument selection. You do not use a liquidity facility to solve a solvency problem, and you do not use a disability provision to solve a candidate-quality problem. They are different documents with different signatories and different effects.
What follows from that is a much narrower criticism of the people the question is about, and I think a fairer one. Cabinet officers had almost nothing available to them. The section required their Vice President to move first and she was never going to. Congressional Democrats had no constitutional role whatsoever.
What congressional Democrats and party leaders did have was the nomination, and the ability to say in public in 2023 that they wanted a contest. Some of them said it privately. None of them said it where it would have cost them anything.
That is the failure. It is a party failure, not a constitutional one, and calling it a coup question keeps the argument on ground where nobody has to answer for the thing they actually controlled.
Bismarck, ND
I want the text in front of people before the argument, because I have heard four commentators this week describe a mechanism that is not in the Constitution.
Section 4: the Vice President and a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments transmit a written declaration. That is the trigger. The Vice President is not optional. Congress has no part in starting it. If the President objects, he gets his powers back in four days unless they re-declare, and then Congress needs two-thirds of both houses to keep him out.
Now the test I run on everything. A Republican president, eighty-one, visibly declining. Would I want his Vice President and Cabinet to declare him unable to discharge the office in the middle of an election year, knowing his own party’s House would never supply two-thirds and the powers would revert inside a month?
No. I would want the party to run a primary. Same answer here.
That is the whole finding and it is not complicated. Section 4 is written for an event — a stroke, a coma, a shooting. It requires the people closest to a president to declare him unable, immediately, in writing, and then to survive a vote they cannot win if he objects. It has never been used in fifty-seven years and it was not going to be used here.
What compliance work teaches is that a control nobody can execute is not a control. It is a line in a manual that makes the manual look complete.
The available control was the nomination and it sat with the party the entire time. The people this question is about are being asked why they did not use a constitutional provision they could not operate, when the real question is why they did not use the ordinary political one they could. Nobody needs a coup to hold a primary.
Clermont, FL
Every operation has an emergency stop and a normal procedure, and the mistake people make is reaching for the stop when what they needed was to run the procedure on schedule.
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is the emergency stop. It is designed for a president who cannot function — sudden, obvious, agreed by the people in the room. It requires the Vice President to move first and it produces a temporary transfer that can be undone in four days.
The normal procedure is a nominating contest. It happens every four years, it is on a published calendar, and it requires nobody’s permission.
I consult with small firms and I see this pattern constantly. An owner has a problem that a routine annual process would have solved. He skips the routine process, the problem gets worse, and eventually somebody proposes the emergency measure — at which point everybody argues about whether the emergency measure is legitimate and nobody discusses the routine one that was skipped.
That is exactly where this argument is. Everybody is debating whether Cabinet officers should have raised a constitutional provision they could not have operated, and almost nobody is asking why a party with a visible capacity concern arranged a nominating season with no debates and no serious contest.
The second question has an answer and it is uncomfortable, which is presumably why the first one gets all the airtime.
So: they should have talked about capacity in public, absolutely, and they should have done it in 2023 when the ordinary mechanism was still on the calendar. Talking about it is not a coup and calling it one is a way of avoiding the smaller and more damaging admission — that the routine procedure was available, and was cancelled, by the same people now debating the emergency one.
Jacksonville, FL
Ports post a relief-captain rule before the storm. I want to talk about what the rule actually says, because it does not say what people think.
The relief captain in Section 4 is the Vice President, and she has to sign first. A majority of the Cabinet signs with her. That is the whole trigger. Congress is not in it.
And the rule is temporary. The master can reclaim the bridge by written declaration, and gets it back in four days unless the relief captain and the officers re-declare, at which point it goes to a vote requiring two-thirds of both houses. That vote was never available.
So the mechanism people wanted was: a Vice President initiating removal of the President she serves under, in an election year, on a ticket with him, knowing the powers revert within a month. That was not going to happen and it should not be described as a courage failure. It is a design problem in the amendment.
Here is what I would rather people were discussing on July fifteenth.
Four days ago, at the NATO summit, the President introduced the Ukrainian president as President Putin. That evening, at his own press conference, he referred to Vice President Trump. Same day, twice, on the two subjects he had called the press conference to demonstrate command of.
That is not a clip anybody edited. It is a scheduled event the White House chose, in a format it selected, to answer this exact question, and it produced two of the worst moments of the presidency inside twelve hours.
Nineteen or twenty congressional Democrats have now said publicly that he should stand down. That number was zero on June twenty-sixth.
So the honest description of where we are is not that anybody is contemplating a coup. It is that a party is doing, badly and in public and three weeks before its convention, the thing it declined to do on a calendar in early 2023. The Constitution was never going to help with this. The primary calendar would have.
Las Vegas, NV
I want to talk about what the word coup is doing in this question, because it is doing a lot of work and none of it is honest.
A coup is extra-legal seizure. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a numbered section of the Constitution with a specified signatory list and a congressional appeal. Whatever you think of using it, it is not a coup, and the people calling it one are using the word to make a conversation unspeakable rather than to describe anything.
Having said that, our side should stop demanding the section, because the section was never going to work.
It needs the Vice President’s signature first. It produces a temporary transfer the President can contest in four days. Contested, it needs two-thirds of both chambers, which in this Congress is not close to available. Anybody who signed it would have been out of a job within a month with the President restored and considerably angrier.
In my business that is called a play with no out. You do not run it, and you do not blame the dealer for not running it.
So what should they have done? Said out loud what they were saying privately. That is it. Not a proceeding, not a signature, not a section number. Just the sentence: we have a capacity concern and the party should have a contest.
Saying that in 2023 would have cost each of them something and cost the party very little. Saying it now, in the third week of July, has cost the party everything it was going to cost, and the people saying it are the same people who did not.
The coup framing was never about protecting the Constitution. It was about making the ordinary sentence unsayable, and it worked for about two years.
Knoxville, TN
The design finding here is that the country has a mechanism for the wrong failure mode.
Section 4 is built for a sudden event. Stroke, coma, gunshot. The premise is that the Vice President and the Cabinet walk into a room, agree in an afternoon, and sign — and the President is in no condition to contest it. That is why the four-day reversion clause is there. It assumes a man who cannot write a letter.
What the country actually had was gradual decline in a man fully capable of writing a letter, lucid enough to contest, and surrounded by people whose positions depended on him. Every feature of Section 4 that makes it work for a coma makes it useless for this.
In public works terms, that is a specification written for the wrong load case. The structure is fine. It is not the structure the site required.
And there is no other provision. Nothing in the Constitution addresses a president who can perform the office some of the time, on a schedule his staff controls, with no acute event to point at. Impeachment requires a high crime. Section 4 requires inability the Vice President will attest to. Between those two there is nothing at all.
So the whole conversation about whether Cabinet officers should have invoked the amendment is a conversation about a tool that does not fit the job. The tool that fit was a nominating contest, which is not in the Constitution, which is why nobody discusses it in constitutional terms, and which was cancelled by the people who had it.
The reform, for whatever it is worth to somebody reading this in twenty years: the country needs something between impeachment and a coma. It will not build one, because every president would be the first to be subject to it and no Congress is going to hand that instrument to the other party. So we will keep having this argument every time, and it will keep being conducted about a section that was never going to apply.
Sydney, Australia
I have been asked to comment on whether raising a leader’s capacity in public would have been a coup, and I want to be careful, because from where I sit the question is close to unintelligible.
In my country we remove sitting prime ministers. Routinely. Kevin Rudd was removed by his own party room in June 2010, overnight, and replaced by Julia Gillard before the country had finished breakfast. Gillard was removed by Rudd in 2013. Tony Abbott was removed by Malcolm Turnbull in 2015. Turnbull was removed by Scott Morrison in 2018. Four sitting prime ministers, four party-room ballots, eight years.
Nobody called any of it a coup. The word does not come up, because the mechanism is a published party rule. A member moves a spill motion, the room votes, and the country has a different head of government by dinner.
The British arrangement is more formal and equally ordinary. Fifteen per cent of Conservative MPs write letters to the chairman of the 1922 Committee and a confidence vote follows automatically. That threshold is currently something like fifty-three signatures. Thatcher went that way in 1990. May survived a vote and resigned six months later. Johnson survived a vote and resigned six weeks later. Truss did not last long enough for the letters to matter.
Canada now has a statutory version. Under the Reform Act, each parliamentary caucus votes after an election on whether to adopt the power to remove its own leader by simple majority. The Conservatives adopted it and used it on Erin O’Toole in February 2022, seventy-three votes to forty-five, in a single meeting.
So the comparative answer to this question is that every system closely related to the American one has a mechanism for replacing a head of government mid-term, it requires a specified number of signatures, it does not require the leader’s consent, and it is used.
The United States has two provisions and neither is that. Impeachment requires a high crime. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment requires the Vice President to declare the President unable, produces a temporary transfer, and can be reversed in four days unless two-thirds of both chambers agree.
Neither is a leadership-change mechanism. They are emergency provisions for a criminal and for a man in a coma, and the country has been trying all year to use one of them for a problem that is neither.
The structural point I would offer is not that the American design is worse. It is that a president elected separately from his legislature cannot be removed by his own party, which is the intended consequence of separating the two. What follows is that the only lever available is the nomination — a private party matter with no published rule, no threshold, and no procedure. That is why this took three weeks of telephone calls in July rather than one meeting in 2023.
The absence of a form is the whole finding. A Westminster leader knows every morning that fifty-three letters ends him, and that knowledge disciplines his behaviour continuously. An American president faces no equivalent, and neither does the party that nominated him.
Sheffield, Jamaica
My colleague from Sydney will tell you the Westminster systems can replace a leader in a morning, and she is right, and I want to put the other half of that on the table before anyone in this Forum starts drafting an amendment.
Be careful what you ask for. This hemisphere has the mechanism everyone here says the United States lacks, and the results have not been edifying.
Peru’s constitution permits Congress to declare the presidency vacant for “permanent moral or physical incapacity.” That is the clause — moral incapacity, undefined, requiring eighty-seven votes out of a hundred and thirty. It is exactly the flexible removal instrument this Forum has spent an hour wishing for.
Look at what it produced. Congress used it against Fujimori in 2000. It was attempted against Vizcarra in September 2020, failed, was brought again in November, and succeeded a hundred and five to nineteen. His replacement, Manuel Merino, lasted five days before protests in which two young men were killed forced him out. Francisco Sagasti became the third president in a week. Pedro Castillo was removed under the same clause in December 2022 after attempting to dissolve Congress.
Six presidents in roughly six years, none of them removed by an election, all of them removed under a provision written to address incapacity.
I do political economy and I have spent my working life on institutional capacity in small states, which means I have watched a great many countries discover that a removal mechanism does not stay a removal mechanism. It becomes a bargaining instrument. Once a legislature learns it can vacate the presidency on a vague standard, the standard stops describing the president’s condition and starts describing the legislature’s arithmetic. “Moral incapacity” in Peru today means very little about anybody’s mind. It means somebody has eighty-seven votes.
So I would say two things to this panel, and they pull against each other.
The first is that the correspondents are right about what happened here. Nobody needed a constitutional provision to hold a nominating contest in 2023. The party had the only lever that mattered and declined to use it while it was cheap. That criticism stands and it does not require any new machinery.
The second is a caution. The instinct running through this discussion — that there ought to be a section somebody could have invoked — is the instinct that produced Article 113 in Lima. It looked responsible when it was drafted. It has since been used to remove presidents for reasons having nothing to do with capacity, by legislatures that discovered they liked the power.
The American arrangement is bad at removing a declining president. That is a real cost and it has been on display all year. It is also, and not by accident, bad at removing an inconvenient one. Before this Forum recommends a fix, it should say which of those two properties it is prepared to give up, because in the countries I study you do not get to keep only the first.
