That’s the argument he keeps losing, because the people he’s arguing with want a third body that doesn’t exist. So this is for John, and it answers him with the record rather than the text. Both bodies he named have been asked. Here is what each did.

A second reader, posting under a handle on the same thread, asked the version John didn’t: “What if he tries another coup, now that he has nothing to lose?” That one gets answered too, because the two questions turn out to have the same answer, and it is a date.

Start with the Cabinet, since that’s the one people shout about. Section 4 of the 25th Amendment was ratified on February 10, 1967. It lets the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet declare in writing to the Speaker and the president pro tempore that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The president is relieved on receipt. If he disputes it in writing, he resumes office unless the vice president and Cabinet re-declare within four days, after which Congress has 21 days to decide, and removing him takes two-thirds of both chambers.

In fifty-nine years, that clause has been used zero times.

It was not used on March 30, 1981, when Reagan was shot and came closer to dying than the public was told; his staff drafted the Section 4 papers and never signed them. It was not used in 1987, when Howard Baker arrived as chief of staff, sent an aide named James Cannon to assess the Iran-Contra White House, and got back a memo reporting that staff described the president as “inattentive and inept” and recommending Baker consider Section 4. Baker watched Reagan in person for a while, decided he didn’t see it, and dropped the idea. And it was not used on January 12, 2021, when the House passed a resolution calling on Mike Pence to invoke it, 223 to 205, with one Republican, and Pence answered by letter the same evening that doing so was “not in the best interest of our Nation or consistent with our Constitution,” that the amendment was “not a means of punishment or usurpation,” and that using it would “set a terrible precedent.”

So the mechanism John is right about has a perfect record. The only times a president has handed over power under this amendment, he handed it over himself, under Section 3, for surgery or a colonoscopy.

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That’s the question you keep losing the argument over, because the person making it has most of the facts and you don’t have the dates. So here are the dates.

The Senate spying happened, and the denial was public

In January 2014, CIA personnel went into the computer network the agency had set up for Senate Intelligence Committee staff to review millions of pages of torture-program documents. The committee had gotten hold of an internal CIA review that contradicted what the agency was telling them, and the agency wanted to know how. According to McClatchy’s reporting at the time, Brennan ordered the initial look himself.

On March 11, 2014, Dianne Feinstein took the Senate floor and said the CIA had searched the committee’s computers and may have violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. That same morning Brennan was at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he was asked about it. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “We wouldn’t do that.” He added that it was “beyond the scope of reason.”

On July 31, 2014, the CIA’s own inspector general, David Buckley, reported that five agency employees, two lawyers and three IT staff, had improperly accessed the committee’s side of the network, read the emails of Senate staffers, and that the CIA had then filed a criminal referral against those same staffers with the Justice Department based on inaccurate information. Brennan apologized to Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss. In private.

Then nothing. The Justice Department had already declined, on July 10, to investigate either the CIA’s search or the CIA’s referral against Senate staff. Brennan convened an accountability board under former senator Evan Bayh. In January 2015 it found the five employees had acted “reasonably” and recommended no discipline. Feinstein said she was disappointed that nobody would answer for it. She was right to be.

Here’s the one correction to Makiara’s account. Feinstein did not call for Brennan’s resignation. Mark Udall of Colorado did, on the day the IG report came out. Udall lost his seat three months later. Ron Wyden asked for a public apology and never got one. Feinstein, who had the most reason of anyone to demand his head, took the private apology and kept working with him.

So on the spying: documented, by the CIA itself. The public denial was false. The private apology was the only consequence. That’s where the record stands, and Makiara has it right.

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My immediate family member, a white male: “I get the news that’s actually relevant to me at the gas pump and the grocery store, and being free to travel to both freely. Everything else is just political noise. It’s all just political storms that need to be ridden out, and they are just people in power using their power to transfer money one place or another. We have no power to influence any of that. So why invest emotion in any of it?”

My big zero-effect clap back was that I couldn’t bear to walk through life where my give-a-shit ended at the outside edge of my own skin. So I guess my question is, when people say “That’s just how it is,” how do you explain that there is no predetermined It? The It was not here with the primordial ooze. The It is formed in real time by our own actions and inactions, our choices. Short of shaking people by the shoulders until their stupid heads fling off, how do you convey the urgency of concentration camps, genocide, the resurrection of racism and misogyny, to a person who just can’t be bothered to stand up and say “No, that is not OK”? Or to VOTE?

It got heated. I said we’d never talk about such things again. So now the only conversations we will have will be fakeass fluff, and the weather. I’ll have to constantly carry a pillow so I can scream into it.

, pull up a chair. First, the line about your give-a-shit ending at the edge of your skin is better than you think it was. It landed with zero effect because it was aimed at his character, and nobody has ever changed their mind because a relative described their character to them. But it is a good line, and you should keep it for yourself.

Something else happened in that argument. He handed you something in the middle of the argument and neither of you noticed.

He said the news that matters to him is at the gas pump and the grocery store, and in being free to travel to both. That is his whole list. It is short, it is concrete, and every item on it is set in Washington.

The price at the pump this fall is shaped by a war with Iran, a naval blockade, and a president who posted on Thursday that the next round of strikes will wait until after the election. Diesel hit a record $6.53 last month. Heating oil in Maine is up 77 percent going into winter. The price at the grocery store is shaped by the tariffs the president has imposed, and by what happens to farm labor when immigration enforcement empties the fields. His freedom to drive to either place is a legal right, and legal rights are defined, enforced, and occasionally suspended by people who win elections.

So your relative is following politics. He is following it at the receiving end, with the labels taken off. He believes the pump and the grocery shelf are weather, and that the people in power are a separate storm system that moves money around and never touches the shelf. The connection between the two is the thing he cannot see, and it is also the only thing you need him to see.

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