The 25th Amendment has returned to the spotlight once again thanks to Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s transparent money grab in the form of a new book ironically titled Original Sin. One of the most egregious revelations from the book is that cabinet secretaries were no longer in communication with President Joe Biden in 2023 — and this was after months and months of shorter interviews and protective staff shielding the fading chief executive.
Over the weekend, we learned that, on top of cognitive decline, Biden now has prostate cancer.
The Constitution’s 25th Amendment states that if a president is unable to perform his duties, he can be relieved and replaced by his vice president:
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, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
The line of succession in cases where the president is unable to fulfill his duties (such as a severe stroke, vegetative state, insanity, age-related issues, or death) was not officially spelled out in the Constitution until 1967. But this question came up long before it was official.
President William Henry Harrison won the presidency in 1841 but died in office about a month later. His vice president, John Tyler, decisively stepped in as chief executive and set the precedent of the VP taking over after the president dies.
The first president to challenge this protocol was Woodrow Wilson, who suffered a severe stroke in 1919. This stroke left him paralyzed and unable to communicate. By definition, he would have been unable to respond to those emergency calls in the middle of the night. However, his wife, Edith Wilson, and his doctor covered up how serious the condition was, and Woodrow served out his term with his wife serving as his mouthpiece.
Then we come to the era of John F. Kennedy. After his assassination, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson took over. However, the line of succession was in question because Johnson was known to have serious health issues. To ensure that the American people had a president fit to take office and that the proper procedures were followed to install the vice president, the 25th Amendment stipulating the line of succession and its procedure was officially ratified in 1967.
In 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to politicize the 25th Amendment via legislation in order to throw Trump out of the White House. Her grounds? That Trump was mentally and/or physically unfit to be president. This was classic Democrat political theater and went nowhere.
However, when President Joe Biden entered the Oval Office, he basically said, “Hold my beer…” His decline was obvious from the get-go, even to those who only mildly follow politics.
Clearly, Biden’s presidency was an instance in which the 25th Amendment should have been invoked. He was clearly unable to perform his duties, yet no one in the Democrat Party or the Leftmedia would acknowledge his obvious decline, both physically and mentally. The Democrat machine ran the government, not the president. Biden’s cabinet secretaries were derelict in their duties and failed to inform the proper powers that be of the situation.
It begs the question: Why do we have a 25th Amendment anyway? In light of the Constitution spelling it out and our nearly two centuries of precedent, Biden opted for the Wilson approach — and no one who had any authority said anything about it.
The 25th Amendment is useless if one party colludes and decides that keeping power is more important than doing the right thing. Anyone after the 2024 presidential election campaign can understand why the Democrats didn’t want Kamala Harris. She was an unmitigated disaster. But that doesn’t justify the predicament her party put the American people in.
Does there need to be another constitutional amendment to prevent what happened with Biden from happening again? (In other words, who is guarding the guards?)
This latest escapade by the Democrats is the real constitutional crisis and the real “threat to democracy.” The Democrat Party decided that the safety and security of the American people didn’t matter as much as the Left’s retention of power.
