Make It Again: The 25th Amendment Is Just Bad

*OK, the first three sections are **fine** but the fourth section is so bad it overshadows them completely.*

The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is, bad; just, really, really bad.

OK, one section of it is just, really, really bad.

But that’s the one section anyone pays attention to, so it kinda sticks out.

The first three sections:

closes the debate over whether a Vice President succeeds a dead President or just becomes “acting” President
sets up a mechanism for getting a new Vice President if the old one is no longer operative
creates a method for a President to voluntarily step down for a bit

Those are fine. Really.

They solve small but real problems, and do a decent job of it.

But Section 4 is a total stinker.

Section 4 defines a process by which a President can be removed against their will.

And it’s a mess.

First, continuing the ancient tradition that the United States is run by politicians rather than the actual people, it doesn’t allow for recall elections. These were well established in the West before this amendment, so they definitely knew how to do it, but ya can’t have folks getting directly involved in this kinda thing now can ya?

They might get … ideas.

So the process it sets up is:

the Vice President, who was chosen by that President, decides the President needs to be removed
they get a majority of the Cabinet, who were chosen by that President, to publicly agree
[there’s some back-and-forth if the President disagrees, which eventually goes to Congress]
the Vice President gets to be President

Seriously, the dude who starts it gets to be President at the end.

This is literally a formalized coup.

So that’s not good, to start with.

More importantly that the whole coup aspect, though, is the fact that it totally depends on a bunch of people that were selected by the President getting together to remove that President.

Did they not notice that, just maybe, Presidents might know about this and choose their Vice President and Cabinet with this possibility in mind?

It basically just guarantees that malicious Presidents will choose their Vice Presidents and Cabinet members mainly for personal loyalty, and it gives that President an incentive to corruptly reward them to keep them loyal.

This is a bad design.

It needs to depend on more than just a group of people who were selected personally by the President; it needs outsiders who have no reason to be personally indebted to the President but who would not personally benefit from seeing them removed.

It needs a Shadow President, and a Shadow Cabinet.

Swap them in for the Vice President and Cabinet and the rest of the process can be left pretty much as it is: the Shadow Cabinet removes the President, the Vice President takes over and Congress decides if there’s a disagreement over anything.

The required vote thresholds in Congress should probably be lowered as well, to reflect the fact that the Executive branch is also involved in the process so it should take less Congressional support than impeachment does.

This would, presumably, result in more Presidents being removed than with the current system but since the current system’s total is zero that would be the case with any effective replacement.