Break Glass

Invoking the 25th Amendment has long been unthinkable. It's time.

Section 4 of the 25^th Amendment to the Constitution is the equivalent of the warning on a fire alarm: “In case of emergency, break glass.” The glass is rarely broken, and most of us have seen the alarms and the warnings and paid no attention. Well, most of us have paid no attention to the 25^th Amendment — but it is time to break the glass and pull the trigger on its Section 4.

Over the past months, we have gone from viewing the idea of removing Donald Trump from office as an obvious and risible fantasy of his most vociferous opponents to something far more tangible, as more and more Americans — including some from the right, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson — have seen the brutal reality of a president unhinged. The danger to all of us, and the world, from a madman in the White House makes consideration of this method of removal urgent.

The 25^th Amendment is mostly about presidential and vice presidential succession. It emerged after the assassination of John F. Kennedy; championed by Indiana Senator Birch Bayh. It was spurred by the recognition that if a president died or resigned during the term of office and was succeeded by the vice president, there would be no vice president for the remainder of the term. That would leave the speaker of the House as next in the line of succession and would deprive the president and the nation of a second in command. So the core of the amendment was to provide a process to enable the successor to the presidency to pick a new vice president, with the requirement that the individual nominated be confirmed by a majority vote in both houses of Congress.

But there was more to the amendment, which was added to the Constitution in 1967. There was a provision to deal with the disability of a president, enabling him to temporarily give the full powers of the office to the vice president until the president was able to resume the post and send a written declaration to confirm it. This provision has been used several times, when presidents underwent anesthesia for an operation — typically a colonoscopy lasting a few hours.

Then came Section 4, never yet invoked. It is there so a president, willing or not, who is unable to perform his duties, posing a danger to the nation for whatever reason, can be removed from the post and replaced by the vice president. For millions not up on the details of the Constitution, they learned about Section 4 in the movie thriller Air Force One, when the president, played by Harrison Ford, in jeopardy on his plane hijacked by terrorists, almost lost his post when his movie Cabinet urged the vice president, played by Glenn Close, to invoke it (spoiler alert: she didn’t).

In the real world, invoking Section 4 is highly difficult, as it should be. It requires first that the vice president and a majority of Cabinet secretaries submit a written declaration to Congress stating the president is incapable of serving. As soon as that happens, the VP becomes acting president. The president, however, can contest the action by submitting a declaration of fitness to Congress. If that happens, Congress is required to meet within 48 hours and decide the issue within 21 days, with a 2/3rds vote in both houses needed to keep the vice president in the office; otherwise, the president is back in charge.

Of course, under any other circumstances, there is no way Vice President JD Vance or Trump’s Cabinet of lickspittles and toadies would do something like this. But the urgency has become especially clear in recent days through Trump’s shocking and disgraceful Truth Social posts, especially the one on Easter Sunday, and his repeated calls for war crimes and genocide against Iran. His lies and fantasies have become more convoluted, showing signs of dementia on top of his megalomania.

It should be evident to everybody except committed cultists that we have a malignant narcissistic psychopath as president, with control over the military and the atomic arsenal, who is deteriorating mentally before our very eyes.

It is not as if Vance, who lies about Ukrainian interference in the Hungarian election and fawns over Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, would be a great improvement on Trump when it comes to lies and loathsome policies. But Vance would not make reckless threats or descend into madness; he would not threaten America and the world directly. And he might not have the same power to turn Congress into a weak and subservient agent of the president and cause it instead to develop some sense of agency as an independent legislature.

God knows what Trump will do in two weeks when the latest “ceasefire” ends. Or what our military would do if he issues an order to obliterate Iran. But whether we have Armageddon in the coming weeks or not, this set of episodes has made it abundantly evident that the danger Donald Trump represents to America and the world is growing by the day. Invoking the 25^th Amendment has long been unthinkable. The insurmountable hurdles should be surmounted. It should be invoked as soon as possible.

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Norman Ornstein is a renowned political scientist, co-host of the podcast “Words Matter,” and author of books, including “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.”

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