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It’s a mechanism for dealing with presidents who cannot function, not those whose personalities provoke opposition.
Calls to invoke the 25th Amendment have become a kind of political reflex — trotted out whenever opponents of a sitting president decide that sharp rhetoric, unconventional behavior, or controversial decision-making must somehow amount to incapacity. With Donald Trump, this refrain has reached predictable levels: he’s “unfit” or “unstable,” critics say, and therefore should be removed not through elections or even impeachment, but via the Constitution’s emergency mechanism for presidential disability. That argument fundamentally misunderstands what the 25th Amendment is and why it exists.
Ratified in 1967 in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the 25th Amendment was designed to address a narrow but serious problem: what happens when a president is incapable of exercising the powers of the office? Section 4, the most discussed (and most misunderstood) provision — and one that has never been invoked — allows the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to declare that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Upon transmitting that declaration to Congress, the vice president immediately assumes the role of acting president.
Crucially, the amendment anticipates disagreement. If the president contests the declaration, Congress must decide the issue, requiring a two-thirds vote in both houses to sustain the vice president’s judgment. That’s an extraordinarily high bar, reflecting the gravity of sidelining a duly elected president without impeachment.
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute.