John is a paid subscriber who has been making the same point under three different pieces this week, and he’s been making it to people who deserved it. Under the Both Chambers piece, after a commenter demanded removal: “It just drives me crazy when people start shouting about the 25th Amendment or impeachment,” he wrote, “without realizing how they really work.” He then laid out Section 4 correctly, which almost nobody does: the Cabinet letter, the president’s rebuttal, the 21 days, the two-thirds. Under the Empty Lawn piece, after I argued the standard for fitness either exists or it doesn’t, he agreed it exists and asked the harder question. First “find someone who can LEGALLY enforce it,” he wrote, and then: “There are only two bodies that can do that...Congress or the Cabinet.”
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.