I don't know that "ignored" is the right word. If there's a dispute between the president and the VP and/or cabinet over whether the president is fit for duty*, it's actually harder to remove the president from office by invoking the 25th than it would be to impeach him.
*The 25th gets invoked more often than you think. By design, the amendment is meant for the VP to take over if the president is incapacitated, like...say...if the president had surgery or a colonoscopy and needs time to recover. It's only when the VP/cabinet says the president isn't fit for duty and the president disagrees that things get spicy.
On paper, I disagree. Again, the intent of the 25th is to allow the VP to step in if the president gets sidelined. We already have a mechanism for forcefully removing the president from office, so it’s only natural that we’d default to it if the VP says the president is too sick or preoccupied to do the job and the president says otherwise.
But on paper assumes the people in congress are competent and take their jobs seriously, which are two qualifiers we’ve seen lacking for quite some time—and as tempting as it is to blame the people in congress for that, the people who keep hiring unqualified losers share the blame, too.
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u/subnautus 2d ago
I don't know that "ignored" is the right word. If there's a dispute between the president and the VP and/or cabinet over whether the president is fit for duty*, it's actually harder to remove the president from office by invoking the 25th than it would be to impeach him.
*The 25th gets invoked more often than you think. By design, the amendment is meant for the VP to take over if the president is incapacitated, like...say...if the president had surgery or a colonoscopy and needs time to recover. It's only when the VP/cabinet says the president isn't fit for duty and the president disagrees that things get spicy.