Calls by the top Democrats in Congress — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York — to remove President Trump from office by invoking the 25th Amendment demonstrate their profound ignorance of the Constitution.
...They are peddling a constitutional canard.
The 25th Amendment provides for the president’s removal and replacement in the event that he is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office."
Although incapacity is not defined, the legislative history summarized by the Congressional Research Service makes it abundantly evident that the framers of the amendment envisioned a chief executive who was stricken by a debilitating stroke, heart attack, or bodily injury (such as in an attempted assassination) and was physically or mentally disabled as a direct consequence.
The authors of the amendment, which was proposed by Congress and ratified by the states after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, made it clear that it was not intended to facilitate the removal of an unpopular or failed president, or for any other political purpose. Concerns about character are dramatically different than mental incapacity.
Sen. Birch Bayh, D-Ind., who was the architect of the amendment, stated that the word "unable" meant "an impairment of the president’s faculties" such that he is "unable either to make or communicate his decisions as to his own competency to execute the powers and duties of his office."
On the House side, the principal framer was Rep. Richard Poff, R-Va. He cited "some physical ailment or sudden accident" rendering a president "unconscious or paralyzed and therefore unable to make or to communicate the decision to relinquish the powers of his office."....
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Originally Posted by Peter1469
