Impolite Company: It’s Time To Invoke the 25 th Amendment

Opinion: By Scott Wingerter

President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline has reached an unsustainable level. The man needs to resign, or if unwilling, Vice President Harris, and the cabinet need to make the tough decision to forcibly retire the President. The vehicle to implement this decision is the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The relevant section reads as follows:

“Section 4. 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.”

1. Throughout the tenure of President Biden’s term of office, he has made gaff after gaff, mistake after mistake, and blunder after blunder. This is not the same foot in the mouth, stumbling over words that was associated with President George W. Bush, this is far worse. This pattern has been on display for the whole world to see for Biden’s entire Presidency and was present even during the campaign in 2020. Recently Biden has repeatedly referred to his son Bo Biden “dying in Iraq” when in fact, Mr. Biden passed away from cancer in 2015. President Biden has twice in the past few weeks referred to “begging President El Sisi of Mexico to open the gate” to allow Palestinian refugees to escape the Israel-Hamas War. El Sisi is the President of Egypt…
While Impolite Company is a political commentary and opinion article, and there can be no
doubt as to this author’s political leanings, this issue should transcend politics. Everyone can see what is happening here. Vice President Kamala Harris, and the cabinet have a duty and obligation to the American People to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment and remove Joe Biden from office. Almost no one in America wants Kamala Harris to be President. One cannot be sure that even she would want that! While that result would almost assuredly be a continuance of an unmitigated disaster, it unfortunately is the responsible thing to do.
Democrats are going to have to face the fact that Joe just can’t do the job any longer, if he ever was in the first place. While this is a very dangerous position for America to be in, it is not the first. William Henry Harrison died shortly after taking office in 1841. He was literally sick in bed the entirety of his short-lived term of office. John Tyler assumed office upon his death. Millard Fillmore took over after President Zachary Taylor died a year into his term in 1851 from a 1 https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxxv stomach disease. Andrew Johnson assumed the Presidency after the Lincoln assassination in 1865, and Chester A. Arthur followed suit when President Garfield was likewise assassinated sixteen years later in 1881. Twenty years after that, Theodore Roosevelt would take the place of William McKinley when he was gunned down at a campaign event in Buffalo New York. Finally, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson would all ascend to the Presidency after the elected President died in office.

One of the major historical catalysts that led to the adoption of the Twenty-fifth Amendment was the last year of Woodrow Wilson’s term of office. On October 2 nd , 1919, Wilson suffered a stroke that left him incapacitated for months. Instead of the elected Vice President Thomas Marshall taking over the Presidential duties, Wilson’s wife Edith did so. Wilson’s condition was kept secret until February of 1921, at which point Warren G. Harding was less than a month away from taking the oath of office. All these incidents posed a threat to America’s national security, yet America has always survived. It was not until 1965 that the Twenty-fifth Amendment was ratified. Since then, Section 3 has been invoked several times, including most recently when President Biden underwent a routine colonoscopy. Section 4 has never been invoked, although in Reagan’s second term it was discussed when those close to him started to see a cognitive decline that would eventually be diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease.
It is worth noting that Democrats were very quick to call on Vice President Mike Pence and
cabinet officials within the Trump Administration to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment to
forcibly remove President Trump from office. Both Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer called for such action as recently as January 7 th , 2021. Additionally, the conga line of legacy media personnel and political commentators calling for the same action from 2016-2021 is too numerous to mention. Yet, where are these calls now?
When the Special Counsel Robert Hur released his report on Joe Biden’s Classified Document scandal on February 1 st , 2024, the bombshell ignited in spectacular fashion. “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. “ 2 So, in essence, Biden is either clearly guilty of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and therefore, is a felon, or he too feeble minded to be prosecuted. If he is too feeble minded to be prosecuted, then he is clearly too feeble minded to be President of the United States. Vice President Harris, and the cabinet have a duty and responsibility to the People of the United States to remove him from office.

2 https://www.justice.gov/storage/report-from-special-counsel-robert-k-hur-february-2024.pdf