President Biden has gotten an undeserved free pass for violating the 25th Amendment. That goes double for Kamala Harris and by extension the Democrat party. Governing while incapacitated will prove to be the most serious offense of the Biden presidency, with stiff competition. Even now, Biden should be removed from office, given that the constitutional process takes immediate effect.
No one doubts that Biden’s mental decline has rendered him “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Not a single voice argues to the contrary.
The residual debate for historians is when the inability commenced. Did his cognitive decline predate and explain his basement campaign? How long has the legacy press misled the public on his behalf? Donors witnessed his obvious mental defect during the 2024 campaign, even as Jill, White House staffers, and the entire Cabinet enforced omertà. Although the Democratic leadership willingly installed Harris as the nominee in a post-debate panic, they have yet to admit Biden’s incapacity.
Actions taken by Biden during his disability radically undermine our system of separated powers. Harris is complicit and, if possible, even more derelict for independently failing to declare his inability. Her constitutional violation of one of the few duties entrusted to the vice president forever mars her tenure.
Unlike legislative and judicial powers, which are broadly distributed, the executive power is vested solely in the president. Due to this extraordinary responsibility, the president is the only official required to take an oath of office and obligated to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” In addition to impeachment, the president has always been subject to removal for “inability to discharge the powers and duties” of the office.
The difficulty of the original Constitution is that nothing else about removal was defined. The problem became manifest when William Henry Harrison served 31 days in 1841 before dying of pneumonia. John Tyler insisted that he automatically had become president, even though the Constitution may be read to say the powers and duties of the presidency, not the office itself, “devolve” to the vice president. Right or wrong, precedent was set for seven subsequent vice presidents to assume the presidency.
The unsettling indeterminacy peaked with Kennedy’s assassination. Not only was Johnson riding in the motorcade, but there was no mechanism to install a successor vice president. As a result, under the presidential succession act, the next in line for the presidency was 72-year-old speaker of the House John McCormack.
In record speed, the 25th Amendment was proposed in 1965 and ratified by 1967. In addition to setting forth a detailed process for removing a president, the amendment imposed two obligations of critical relevance today.
First and foremost, it specified that the president is obligated to declare his own inability, either temporarily or permanently. Biden thus bears specific constitutional responsibility for failing to remove himself from office. His exercise of power while disabled exceeds that of Edith Wilson, marking Biden’s term as the most constitutionally illegitimate in U.S. history.
Even if one impossibly limits Biden’s disability to post-election, it includes 50 acts signed into law in December; more than 60 presidential actions; lifetime appointments to the federal bench; attempts to sabotage Trump’s border wall; continued cancelation of student debts; 37 commuted death sentences; forced Israeli ceasefire directives and Ukrainian aid; rushed release of billions to favored constituencies; and last-minute consequential regulatory actions, including an expected push for a Medicare drug cost cap and limits on methane emissions. More will be uncovered, with a crescendo of abuse expected to run on to January 20.
Aside from the president, only the vice president can remove the president for the inability to discharge his powers and duties. The 25th Amendment requires that the inability determination be supported by a majority of “either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide.”
Vesting removal power in the vice president highlights Harris’s extraordinary dereliction of constitutional duty. She knowingly and willfully allowed Biden to continue illegitimately in power. During the campaign, she neither admitted to Biden’s inability nor defended her constitutional failure. She refused to be named acting president as the 25th Amendment requires so as not to be saddled with responsibility for Biden’s record. In so doing, she short-circuited her obligation to initiate the mandated political process involving the Cabinet or Congress.
Harris has no political future, but if she dares to run for elective office, her refusal to remove a mentally defective Biden from office must be hammered home.
The obligation to remove Biden continues to this day. Under the 25th Amendment, Biden is removed from power the instant he transmits his inability declaration to the Senate pro tempore and the speaker of the House. Same for Harris’s joint transmittal. Every act and action taken by Biden while disabled reeks to high heaven. President Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025 cannot come soon enough.
In October 2020, one month before Biden’s election, 43 Democrats introduced a bill to remove the president for, among things, “mental illness or deficiency.” President Trump immediately called out the legislation as a transparent measure to replace Harris for “Sleepy Joe.” Although the bill died without action, the proposed legislation was a smoking-gun warning to Biden and, in retrospect, overt recognition of his coming unconstitutional reign of disability. Nancy Pelosi likely knew it all since October 2020, even including a requirement in the bill for a medical examination of the president and the right to draw an adverse judgment if he refused.
Democrats were all too happy to declare Trump a threat to democracy, absurd in light of his winning the Electoral College and the popular vote. Their silence about the failure to remove Biden from office is worse than hypocrisy. It condones constitutional subversion.
Four years ago, Joe Biden swore to himself and the American people that he would “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” In refusing to step down when disabled, Biden violated his oath and harmed constitutional order beyond reckoning. His legacy is the illegitimate exercise of the powers and duties of the presidency.
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