Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

"I'm the most powerful one here. Why am i so alone?" To even "the best" that thought must sneak in occasionally.

"trump at the G20 - More Sulking and Brooding in Argentina"

Then he has to told by Merkel to leave the stage. He has to be nudged by May to turn around with all others.

25 lurks. But..., then there is Jaime Raskin...

25th Amendment: How do we decide whether the president is competent?

Elaine Kamarck
Wednesday, January 10, 2018

[...]

Of course, the big problem here is that no vice president in his right mind would do anything that looked like he was trying to unseat and then succeed the president. I worked for Vice President Al Gore during Bill Clinton’s impeachment and saw how he went out of his way to support the president—with good reason. Vice presidents can do a great deal of damage to themselves and to our democracy by seeming to engineer a palace coup against the president who selected them. Short of watching Donald Trump run naked and screaming down Pennsylvania Avenue on prime-time television, Mike Pence (or any vice president) would never begin such proceedings. Ditto for the Cabinet officers Trump appointed. And, of course, the President could always fire the Cabinet members that went along with such a movement—throwing the entire effort into chaos.

Wading into this conundrum we have freshman Congressman Jaime Raskin (D-Md.). He is the sponsor of a piece of legislation that seeks to define the phrase in Section 4 which states “or of such other body as Congress may by law provide.” His bill,
Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity Act .. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1987/text , would create a commission empowered to examine the president—any president—and report to Congress on the president’s capacity. It would thus bypass the need for the vice president and at least eight Cabinet secretaries to go to Congress and declare the president unfit.

As a former constitutional law professor, Raskin started wondering about the 25th Amendment even before he got to Congress. As he points out, the first three sections of the amendment have been activated in the past. Section 3, he jokes, might as well be called the “colon” section, having been used when presidents had surgeries or tests involving the colon.

But when Raskin got to Congress he started asking about the “other body” mentioned in the first sentence of Section 4—the one section of the amendment that has never been used. And he found that in 50 years, Congress had never established an “other body” even though there are good arguments for it. First, it creates an alternative to vice presidential action which, as described above, has a very low probability. Second, Raskin’s commission would consist of ten members, appointed by the majority and minority leaders in Congress and consisting of four psychiatrists, four medical doctors and two retired statespersons (such as former presidents)—one from each party. These ten members would elect a chair. Thus, the commission would be completely bipartisan and contain opinions of non-politicians.

Raskin’s bill was introduced in the spring of 2017 and had 19 co-sponsors. It was barely covered by the press. However, it has steadily gathered additional co-sponsors, often in response to another of President Trump’s questionable statements or tweets. Raskin observes, “Essentially after every strange public outburst, there’s a huge influx of inquiries about HR 1987.”

Not surprisingly, as Congress returned from their break and from a week of headlines about Wolff’s book, the bill picked up seven more cosponsors. The following graph illustrates growth in support for the bill.

[Interactive image]
Cosponsors on H.R. 1987
Source: Congress.gov
Brookings Watermark

For all the hype around Michael Wolff’s book, the strange behavior that has people thinking about the 25th Amendment has persisted all year long. From Trump’s bizarre insistence on the size of his inaugural crowd, his firing of the FBI Director James Comey, his insistence on insulting people with whom he shares power such as Republican members of the United States Senate, his taunting of the North Korean dictator, his retweeting of inflammatory anti-Muslim videos, to his ongoing war with the press, Trump’s behavior continues to shock people. And while some of it may make some political sense—such as taking on the media—much of it is and has been counter-productive. It is the propensity for self-inflicted wounds that most worries his friends and his foes alike, and is leading people to consider a piece of the Constitution that has never been considered before.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/01/10/25th-amendment-how-do-we-decide-whether-the-president-is-competent/