What the Founders left undefined — and why it matters now.

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967 after the Kennedy assassination, contains a phrase its drafters chose with intent. It authorizes the Vice President and a majority of either the Cabinet or an “other body as Congress may by law provide” to declare a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

The record makes clear that section four was not intended as a means of removing the president simply because he or she makes an unpopular decision.

That caveat, from Fordham law professor Joel Goldstein via PBS NewsHour, is honest and important. But the drafters also deliberately declined to define the word unable. Legal experts told PBS the language is “intentionally vague and open-ended” because the framers “recognized they couldn’t predict every scenario in which a president could be deemed disabled.” Inability was left elastic on purpose. The framers were not thinking only of coma or stroke. They were thinking of a spectrum of impairment — cognitive, temperamental, and, yes, ethical — that would leave the officeholder unfit to execute the public trust.

A president who is spending his days directing federal contracts to his son’s firm, timing stock purchases to his own agency’s announcements, personally soliciting corporate payments through a ballroom foundation, and running lobbying-client policy through cabinet officials drawn from those same lobbying firms is not “discharging the powers and duties of his office.” He is discharging them in the wrong direction. The office exists to serve the public. It is being run to serve a client roster.

On April 14, 2026, Rep. Jamie Raskin introduced legislation to create the Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office — the “other body” the amendment envisions but that Congress never created. As Raskin put it, Congress has “a solemn duty to play our defined role under the 25th Amendment by setting up this body.” More than 85 House and Senate Democrats had by then called for Trump’s removal, per Axios reporting.

The honest assessment of the barriers. Section 4 requires the Vice President plus a Cabinet majority (or the Raskin commission) to trigger the transfer. That will not happen: the Vice President will not move, the Cabinet will not move, and Republican leadership in Congress will not entertain the two-thirds vote a contested removal would require. Any candid analyst has to say so.

Why the barriers do not negate the case. A constitutional argument does not lose its force because the political path is closed. The record is being made now, and it will be examined later — by historians, by courts reviewing the corruption cases that will eventually be brought, and by future Congresses considering whether to finally stand up the Section 4 body Raskin has proposed. The measure of a democracy is not only what it manages to fix in the moment. It is whether it names, clearly and on the record, what has gone wrong.