What to know about the 25th Amendment and Joe Biden as Republicans allege a ‘cover-up’

President Joe Biden’s planned address to the nation on Wednesday night will be an opportunity to explain his decision not to run for reelection and show he is still up to the task of serving as president – a job he has for nearly six more months, until January 20, 2025.

No matter what Biden says or how much his fellow Democrats try to build up his accomplishments as president, multiple Republicans have argued that the 25th Amendment to the Constitution should be used to remove Biden from office ASAP.

The idea that Biden is unfit to serve is in contrast to the Trump campaign’s argument that Biden should continue as the Democratic nominee; it filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing Biden should not be able to transfer his campaign war chest to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Even before Biden dropped out of the race, Rep. Chip Roy, the Texas Republican, filed a resolution in June after the president’s disastrous debate performance, calling on the 25th Amendment to be used against Biden.

On the morning Biden dropped out of the race, House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Republicans have discussed how to investigate whether Democrats engaged in wrongdoing for arguing Biden is up to the job of being president.

“They – the Democrats have been involved in a big cover-up here,” Johnson said.

After Biden withdrew from the race, Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Republican, wrote letters to Harris and the Cabinet officials in the Biden administration, asking them to remove Biden from office.

“If President Biden is unwilling to resign, for the sake of our great nation, you must do your duty to relieve him of his constitutional powers and duties,” Schmitt wrote in a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and posted on Schmitt’s website.

Trump’s Cabinet discussed the 25th Amendment after the insurrection

It’s hard to believe now that Republicans have reunified around Trump as their presidential candidate – and now that many of them doubt the severity of the January 6, 2021, insurrection – but use of the 25th Amendment was most recently seriously discussed with regard to Trump by his fellow Republicans that year.

Betsy DeVos, who was Trump’s secretary of education, confirmed to USA Today that she and other Trump Cabinet officials considered using the method to remove Trump from office. When it became clear to her that then-Vice President Mike Pence would not support the idea, she resigned from the Trump administration on January 7, 2021.

“There were more than a few people who had those conversations internally,” she said.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has since recommitted himself to Trump and developed some amnesia about the severity of the January 6 attack, can be heard on a January 8, 2021, recording obtained by New York Times reporters in which he says the 25th Amendment can’t be used against Trump because it “takes too long.”

It is, indeed, a complicated process, as we first investigated back in January 2021.

What would it require?

To forcibly wrest power from a sitting president, the vice president would have to be on board, according to the text of the amendment. Read the full language here.

Harris, who has consistently praised Biden and has shown absolutely no indication she thinks Biden is unfit for office, would also need a majority of Biden’s Cabinet officials to agree the president is unfit for office and temporarily seize power from him. Like Harris, they have also expressed complete support for him finishing his term.

In the extremely unlikely event Biden’s allies were to turn on him, Biden could dispute their move with a letter to Congress. Harris and the Cabinet would then have four days to dispute him, after which Congress would be called on to vote – it requires a two-thirds supermajority, usually 67 senators and 290 House members, to permanently remove the president.

Congress could also appoint its own body to review the president’s fitness instead of the Cabinet. In 2020, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced a bill to create a congressional body for this purpose with regard to Trump, but it was not signed into law.

Why do we have the 25th Amendment?

No president has ever been removed from office in this way. The amendment was ratified in 1965, in the wake of the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, whose predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered major heart attacks. It was meant to create a clear line of succession and prepare for urgent contingencies.

Eisenhower suffered a debilitating heart attack while in office in the 1950s. That was before the 25th Amendment, so there was no constitutional rule. Instead, he came to an agreement with then-Vice President Richard Nixon about handing over power.

The portion of the 25th Amendment that allows the vice president and Cabinet to remove the president had in mind a leader who was in a coma or suffered a stroke.

The Reagan administration drafted, but did not sign or transmit, letters to the Senate that would have taken power from Reagan after he was shot in 1981. You can see them at the Reagan Library’s website.

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