A remedy the framers of 1965 wrote for precisely this failure of judgment.

Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, ratified after the Kennedy assassination, is the mechanism the Constitution provides for a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” It has never been invoked. Its authors did not anticipate an assassination alone; they anticipated the more mundane, and in some ways more dangerous, possibility that a sitting president might become incapable of the sober judgment the office requires while still physically able to sign orders and post messages.

The lawmakers who invoked it this spring did so in response to concrete conduct. On April 6, the president posted publicly that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not meet an ultimatum within roughly ten hours. Within twenty-four hours, Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois formally called for Cabinet action. Rep. John Larson of Connecticut filed articles of impeachment and simultaneously demanded 25th Amendment invocation. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi called the threat evidence of a “dangerous pattern of reckless escalation, erratic decision-making, and general conduct” raising grave questions about the president’s fitness. Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona was joined by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rep. Ro Khanna of California, and Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, along with more than thirty other House Democrats, in the same call. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont added their names. Per Forbes’ reporting, so did former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — a Republican.

The constitutional argument is not a political one. It is that a president who threatens to annihilate a civilization by tweet, who drains an emergency reserve to cover the costs of a war he did not ask Congress to authorize, and whose own Cabinet secretaries publicly disagree with his party’s Senate leader about the basic direction of energy policy has demonstrated an inability to reason toward the interests of the nation he was elected to lead.

The Practical Barrier — Honestly Stated

Section 4 requires the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to certify to Congress that the president cannot discharge his duties. Vice President J.D. Vance was chosen by Trump. The Cabinet was chosen by Trump. The mechanism was written on the assumption that people who serve at the pleasure of a failing president would put the country ahead of the man who appointed them. That assumption is, in the current administration, fanciful. Impeachment faces an equally steep math problem in a Senate the president’s party controls.

Why It Still Matters

The barriers are political. They are not constitutional, and they are not moral. The framers of the 25th Amendment understood that a functioning republic requires officials willing to invoke uncomfortable remedies when the alternative is worse. That the current cabinet will not do so is a fact about the current cabinet, not a fact about whether the remedy applies. The record — a war of choice, a drained reserve, record-shattering fuel prices, and a public threat of civilizational annihilation — is what a 25th Amendment case looks like. The country’s obligation to name it accurately does not disappear because the vote count is bad.