FORGET THE 25TH AMENDMENT, HERE'S HOW WE CAN OUST TRUMP

 FORGET THE 25TH AMENDMENT, HERE'S HOW WE CAN OUST TRUMP

By Kelvin Jon Wade

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” What kind of Bond villain meets Emperor Palpatine shit is this? We’ve never seen a more unhinged statement by an American president. But I’m sure he’ll top it. We haven’t reached bottom yet. In fact, I don’t think there is one. Yes, he’s clearly in cognitive decline. He’s a malignant narcissist. Frontotemporal dementia, anyone? We’re all passengers in a car driven by a demented driver. 

And it seems that everyone’s solution is to call for the “Twenty-fifth amendment now!” It sounds tempting, doesn’t it? A mechanism to remove a demented president right there for us to break glass and use. Yes, going from Trump to Vance is like moving from gonorrhea to syphilis but at least Vance can string two coherent sentences together without having to take shortcuts through the quality of pens, the danger of windmills, his record three acings of cognitive tests and describing a ballroom that even Cinderella doesn’t give a shit about. But focusing on Vance misses the point. 

People need to forget the 25th Amendment. It does not work the way most people think it does. In fact, it is the hardest way to try to remove a president from office. 

The 25th Amendment works like this: the Vice-President and a majority of the cabinet meet and decide the president cannot discharge his duties. They send a letter to the Speaker of the House and President Pro Tempore of the Senate informing them of their consensus and the Vice-President becomes Acting President. 

Wow. Presto-change-o, Trump is shuffled off to a gold-gilded nursing home to color pictures of his ballroom and chow down on McDonald’s, right? Not quite. 

At that point, the President can and will send his own letter to the Speaker and President Pro Tempore saying he can perform his duties and just like that, he’s the President again. 

The Vice-President and the cabinet can send another letter saying, “No, but we really, really mean it. The guy is a whackjob!”

From there it moves to Congress and a two-thirds majority vote is required in the House and Senate to remove the president. 

That ain’t happening.

That’s harder than impeachment. Impeachment just requires a simple majority in the House and two-thirds vote in the Senate. That’s what makes the 25th Amendment an impossibility as a method to remove Donald Trump from office. When I hear politicians calling for it, it tells me they’ve clearly never read the friggin’ amendment and are just pandering. 

But let’s look back at that 25th Amendment process. It would never get to a vote anyway. Do you know why? As soon as Trump receives the news that he’s been relieved the Heinz is decorating the Oval Office wall. He’ll fire off his own letter telling Congress that he’s fine and that he’s like a smart person (did you know his uncle was an MIT professor?) who has aced three cognitive tests! And the minute he assumes the powers of the presidency, what will Trump do? He will fire every cabinet member who signed that letter and replace them with followers with even more impressive butt smooching capabilities. That stops the process in its tracks.

The 25th Amendment as it’s written is worthless to stop Donald Trump. Period.

So what could work? Will Speaker Mike Johnson step up and put Articles of Impeachment on the floor? I almost pulled a muscle laughing at that thought. Jellyfish look at that guy and say, “Damn, bro is spineless.”

Since we’re spitballing here, imagine the Democrats win the House and Senate in the midterms. Let’s say the Dems sweep the House with a huge majority and win the Senate 51-49. 

The Democrats easily pass articles of impeachment through the House. Now here’s where it gets tricky. It’s at this point that we see impeachment and removal as a navel gazing, circle jerk. Impeachment requires a two-thirds vote and the Republicans are never going to vote to remove Trump. After Trump led a coup against his own government in 2021, only 7 Republican Senators voted to convict him. While it was historically the largest number of Senators to vote against a president of their own party, it fell woefully short.

But the language of the Constitution says that in the Senate trial, to convict and remove a president, it requires a two-thirds vote of the members present. The 67-vote threshold is only the bar if 100 Senators are present.

In our fictional scenario, the Democrats don’t have to convince a single Republican to vote to remove Trump. They just have to convince 23 to boycott the vote. In that scenario, with 77 members present, the magic two-thirds number to remove is 51.  So  51 Democrats vote to convict and 26 Republicans vote to acquit. 

Ideally you wouldn’t want the vote to be that close. You’d want there to be even less Republicans voting but let’s table that for now. The numbers here are just to demonstrate how it could work. And it is 100% Constitutional.

When a president is convicted he is instantly a civilian. He would be barred from all sensitive areas of the White House, his security clearance is stripped and the moving vans are on their way. There’s no do-overs. No appeals. It’s done. 

It would be incredibly difficult to pull off but I think getting members to just flee Washington would be easier than convincing them to vote to convict.

Would those 23 Republicans be politically dead at that point? Probably. Would they receive death threats and need security? Absolutely. But they already get death threats just for speaking their minds or standing up to Trump. Why not make that scorn matter? Why not do something for your country? It’s a sacrifice that just calls on them to leave Washington. 

The unintended consequence is that such a bold action could breathe new life into MAGA 2.0, spike President Vance’s approval ratings and make 2028 a much more competitive race than otherwise. 

But the plan now is to muse publicly about the preposterous 25th Amendment or hope Mother Nature and Father Time collude to rid us of this orange stain on our democracy. Hope isn’t a strategy.

So there’s my crazy contribution to 86ing 47.