Some Republicans called for former President Joe Biden to be removed from office through the 25th Amendment, including after special counsel Robert Hur’s 2024 report concluded Biden had “a poor memory” and after Biden’s stumbling June 2024 debate performance, which led him to end his reelection campaign.
For all of the partisan chatter, it is highly unlikely this legal procedure to remove a president will happen. Trump has the support of Vice President JD Vance, his Cabinet and the majority of Republicans in Congress.
We asked the White House for its response to Democrats calling to use the 25th Amendment.
“President Trump is working tirelessly on behalf of the American people to fulfill his commonsense America First agenda that nearly 80 million people elected him for,” spokesperson Davis Ingle said.
Here’s how the 25th Amendment works. (We’re not weighing in on whether it should be invoked.)
Can it be used against Trump?
The 25th Amendment, added to the U.S. Constitution in 1967, sought to resolve several thorny issues of presidential and vice presidential continuity. It provides for filling a presidential or vice presidential vacancy.
It also allows the president to declare himself unable to fulfill his duties and transfer power to the vice president.
Section four authorizes the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet, or the vice president and a majority of an “other body” created by Congress, to declare a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Doing so would elevate the vice president to acting president.
The president can resume presidential powers and duties by transmitting a declaration “that no inability exists” to the specified congressional leaders — unless, within four days, the vice president and a majority of the body that initially acted to transfer power away essentially double down on their declaration that the president is unable to discharge his duties. If that’s the case, the vice president continues to act as president.
READ MORE: Trump says ’25th Amendment is of zero risk to me’ while visiting Texas border wall
Then, if Congress, by a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate, agrees that the president is unable to serve, the vice president continues to act as president. Such a move could permanently strip a president of his powers — which is why some legal analysts refer to section four as the “involuntary removal mechanism.”
The amendment sets a high bar for implementation.
“The 25th Amendment has a limited focus on whether a president is physically or mentally incapable of doing his job,” Michael J. Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor, told PolitiFact. “The 25th Amendment is not a remedy for misconduct that the president might have committed.”
While technically the procedure could be invoked, the political reality is that it won’t.
Vance and Trump’s Cabinet are strong Trump supporters. At Cabinet meetings, members routinely praise the president. The majority of Republicans in the House and Senate consistently back his policies and support his legislative agenda.
Trump has mused about the 25th Amendment recently. During a March 26 Cabinet meeting while talking about Iran, Trump said, “I can’t say what we’re going to do, because if I did, I wouldn’t be sitting here for long. They’d probably, what is it called, the 25th Amendment, huh? They’d institute the 25th Amendment, which they didn’t do with Biden, which is shocking.”
What did the amendment’s authors intend?
The push for Congress to formalize a blueprint for handling presidential disability gained traction after President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, although lawmakers had first considered it much earlier in American history.
Kennedy’s death “produced a flurry of additional proposals dealing with the subject,” John D. Feerick wrote in a 1995 article in the Wake Forest Law Review. “These proposals were influenced by the sense at that time that, if Kennedy had lived, the country would have had to deal with the problem of presidential inability in a most tragic setting.”
As congressional hearings unfolded, little controversy surrounded the amendment’s first three sections, according to Feerick. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the real debate centered on when someone other than the president could declare him or her incapacitated.
The amendment’s principal author, Sen. Birch Bayh, D-Ind., embraced an understanding that presidential inability would encompass both physical and mental inability, Joel K. Goldstein, professor of law emeritus at Saint Louis University, previously told PolitiFact.
The formulation Bayh adopted was offered by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., who said presidential inability “involves physical or mental inability to make or communicate his decision regarding his capacity and physical or mental inability to exercise the powers and duties of his office.”
Another important architect of the amendment, Rep. Richard Poff, R-Va., said section four not only applied when the president, because of accident or illness, was unconscious or otherwise unable to make or communicate a decision, but also when “the President, by reason of mental debility, is unable or unwilling to make any rational decision, including particularly the decision to stand aside.”
On July 6, 1965, Congress approved the 25th Amendment, and the necessary 38 states ratified it Feb. 10, 1967.
Legal experts told us the drafters used intentionally vague and open-ended language (i.e., a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”) because they recognized they couldn’t predict every scenario in which a president could be deemed disabled.
But despite the definition’s fuzziness, Goldstein said “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.”
