I’m mystified by Nancy Pelosi’s plan to use the 25th Amendment to wrest power away from Donald Trump — if not before the election, then after. The amendment lays out three cases in which power might be transferred from a President to a Vice President.
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In the first case, the president isn’t there. He’s died or resigned. The transfer is automatic.
In the second case, the president disqualifies himself for some limited amount of time (while he’s under anesthesia for surgery, for example, or binge-watching old episodes of The Apprentice).
In the third case — the one that interest Pelosi — the relevant clauses all begin with
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide…
So we have two possibilities to consider.
The first possibility is that Pelosi is so used to ignoring the plain language of the Constitution that she doesn’t grasp the implications of that word ‘and’. That is, she doesn’t realize that her hope of wresting power from President Trump would require the active participation of Vice President Pence. She can set up all the commissions she wants, but if the Veep isn’t on board, they would have the same amount of authority as a commission to decide whether the Second Law of Thermodynamics should be suspended.
(Side note: The commission that she envisions would have ‘the authority to request a medical exam of the president’. Again, she seems to be having trouble with basic words. Authority to request something isn’t authority at all.)
The second case possibility is that she understands that she would need Pence’s cooperation, but her grasp of Pence’s character is feeble enough that she actually thinks he would participate in such a naked power grab against a President to whom he’s been steadfastly loyal.
Clearly there is someone in this drama who is demonstrating a lack of capacity to hold high office… but it’s not Trump.
