BREAKING: Donald Trump endorses Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
Or maybe that weirdo is just screaming bullshit into the ether, as usual.
Trump and his minions subject us daily to a twin barrage of nonsense. First they insist that President Biden is simultaneously leading an international crime syndicate with his son and a senile old man drooling into his oatmeal. At the same time, his predecessor, who is under four criminal indictments, vomits out an endless stream of gibberish exposing his own deteriorating mental health and ignorance of basic American law.
“WHY HASN’T THE REPUBLICAN PARTY BEGUN THE PROCESS OF INVOKING THE 25th AMENDMENT AGAINST THE WORST & MOST INCOMPETENT PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, CROOKED JOE BIDEN?” he shrieks. “With these facts, they would have done it to us long ago!”
In 1965, after Kennedy’s assassination, Congress decided that Americans could do with a more clear succession plan for their chief executive. Proposed by Senator Birch Bayh, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment provides that the vice president shall become president upon the death or resignation of the executive. It is unequivocal that, in the event President Biden were actually removed, he would be replaced by Vice President Harris.
But that’s not the weirdest part of Trump’s post. Because here on Planet Earth, Republicans in Congress have zero power to invoke the 25th Amendment, since the plain language of the Amendment locates that power in the vice president and the cabinet.
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
With these fact, Democrats would not have done it long ago, because shut up, that is not a thing. And even if it were to come to pass that VP Harris and the cabinet turned on Biden, it would take a two-thirds vote in both Houses of Congress to override Biden’s refusal to leave office. This probably accounts for the failure of Trump’s own cabinet to invoke the Amendment even after Trump incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021.
Obviously, there are not enough hours in the day to debunk all of Trump’s lies. But at the same time, we can’t just allow it to wash over us like a warm bath of acid rain, even as every Biden stutter is treated as a sign of serious neurological impairment.
Trump is deeply ignorant of the law, not to mention basic American civics, and he counts on his followers to be the same. And since we’re not going to be saved from this looming disaster by the Fourteenth Amendment, we better exercise the First while we still have it.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.