The 25th amendment road not taken

It turns out that there was a whole lot of talk in high Republican places about invoking the 25th amendment in the days immediately after the 1/6 insurrection:

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy discussed the 25th Amendment on a call with GOP leadership days after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and said the process “takes too long,” according to an audio recording obtained by two New York Times reporters and shared with CNN.McCarthy also said during the call that he wanted to reach out to then-President-elect Joe Biden as he expressed hope for a “smooth transition,” and said he thought impeachment would further divide the nation.The call took place on January 8, 2021, and the audio was obtained for the new book “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns.

At one point in the recording, McCarthy asks an aide for a readout of what House Democrats had been discussing internally. The aide responds, “I think the options that have been cited by the Democrats so far are the 25th Amendment, which is not exactly an elegant solution here.”

McCarthy interjects to say, “That takes too long too. It could go back to the House, right?”

The aide responds, “Correct. If the President were to submit a letter overruling the Cabinet and the vice president, two-thirds vote in the House and the Senate to overrule the President. So it’s kind of an armful.”

That same day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter to House Democrats raising the 25th Amendment as an option. The House ended up voting days later on a resolution calling on the vice president to activate the 25th Amendment, with only one Republican, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, joining all Democrats to support the measure.

CNN has reached out to McCarthy’s office to request comment on the new audio.At the beginning of the audio, McCarthy can be heard saying, “What the President did is atrocious and totally wrong,” comments that have been previously reported on by The New York Times.

What I find extremely annoying about all this, besides the treason and fascism, is that I handed Mike Pence a beautiful legal mechanism to get rid of Donald Trump’s presidency on the very same day that Trump tried to have Pence lynched, but that fine Christian gentleman didn’t have it in him to do the right thing.

Here is (was) the deal: All Pence had to do was transmit a letter to Congress stating that Trump was “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” [cause he crazy]. Upon transmission of this letter Pence would have become Acting President right then and there!

The beauty of his scheme is that Section 4 of the amendment allows a simple majority of the House, and 40 senators, to block the president from regaining the office for 21 days, and there was at that point less than 21 days left in Trump’s first presidency. Here’s why: After Pence had transmitted the letter, Trump would only become president again if Congress failed to ratify Pence’s action by a two-thirds vote within 21 days of the transmittal of the letter. But there’s nothing in Section 4 that says Congress is required to act during that time. The House obviously would have done nothing (Pelosi was in favor of invoking the 25th) and Democrats in the Senate could simply have filibustered any attempt to act on the matter, which I’m pretty sure would have suited McConnell just fine, and in any case there’s no way 51 senators would have voted to get rid of the Sacred Tradition of the Filibuster ™ to save Donald Trump’s pasty white ass.

Now the only tricky detail is that Pence had to get a majority of the cabinet to go along with this in order to do it, but that’s why they call it Leadership.

In all seriousness, until the whole thing was shoved down the memory hole and came out the other side as just fraternity hijinks, everybody in our political elites understood exactly what Trump had done, and the necessity of getting rid of him, with extreme procedural prejudice.

And there was a simple way of doing it, right there for everyone to see. If Trump had been literally removed from the White House via the 25th amendment, it would have been much harder to engage in the subsequent revisionism that has turned the 1/6 insurrection into something that Republican elites now have to treat as either not very important or as a noble effort to Stop the Steal.

In any event, Congress should pass a statute to fix the mechanism for invoking Section 4, so that you don’t need a majority of the president’s own cabinet to do so. This could come in handy if and when one of the two major political parties is no longer completely insane, so probably around the year 2525 give or take.