The 25th amendment was created for a specific circumstance, actual disability to function as president — not functioning poorly.
If the president is in a coma and decisions need to be made, succession is needed, until the president recovers.
It is NOT designed because the president’s policies are disliked, because his personality is bad, because he has bad personal qualities, even severe ones.
The danger in the amendment is its being abused to remove presidents for political reasons, overriding the voters. We must guard against that abuse, not commit it.
President have caused massive suffering and it’s not been a reason to remove them. They’ve started wrong wars and run them poorly or incompetently, they’ve gotten many people killed, they’ve helped kill many Americans through things like increasing inequality dramatically and opposing healthcare for the American people, they’ve been paranoid and spiteful and even criminal but stayed just ahead of impeachment and not been removed for any of those things, or much more.
We’ve even gotten through a presidency when the president — Wilson - actually was incapacitated — and his wife ran the government.
The ability of the people to choose bad, or very bad presidents, is a right of the people we have to protect.
Or, next time, imagine Obama were president now — the Republicans could find a long list of 25th amendment reasons to say he has to go. Do we want to be the ones to start that precedent?
The right way to fight the terrible presidency is with activism, through the political system, trying to reform the system where it’s broken, not abusing power to violate democracy.
Our chance to prevent trump was in November, not by abusing the 25th amendment.
Trump is an absolute disaster of a president. The question we need to ask is how to fix our political system for voters to understand that and not vote for such people, not how to violate democracy.
trump’s condition would have to be a lot worse to cross from ‘we dislike’ to ‘he is legitimately unable to function, not just function in a way we approve’.
‘But he could start a nuclear war!’
Yes. And the same was said about Reagan being an unbalanced nut, and Barry Goldwater could have been president and it was said about him, and we now know Nixon was saying he wanted to use nuclear weapons against North Vietnam, and John McCain sang ‘bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran’ that could have led to that, and Sarah Palin could have been president, and and and. The time to defeat such a danger is at the ballot booth and activism for the next election.
The 25th is one of the few laws that HASN’T yet been abused by Republicans for a power grab. Let’s keep it that way.