Elizabeth Warren Says Trump’s Cabinet Should Just Invoke the 25th Amendment Already

In an interview on CNN, the Massachusetts senator says if officials think he's unfit for office, they should do something about it.

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If you really think he’s an incorrigible loose cannon and oaf, who has to be lied to all the time to keep the country from descending into chaos, then just invoke the 25th Amendment already. That’s the message from Elizabeth Warren, who said in a CNN interview she would encourage Trump’s cabinet to use its power to oust the president on the grounds that he is unfit for office.

“If senior administration officials think the President of the United States is not able to do his job, then they should invoke the 25th Amendment,” she said Thursday. “The Constitution provides for a procedure whenever the Vice President and senior officials think the President can’t do his job. It does not provide that senior officials go around the President—take documents off his desk, write anonymous op-eds … Every one of these officials have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. It’s time for them to do their job.”

“If senior administration officials think the president of the United States is not able to do his job, then they should invoke the 25th Amendment,” Elizabeth Warren says pic.twitter.com/L8cEnA86BB — Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 6, 2018

She was referring, of course, to the reporting in Bob Woodward’s book on this presidency, Fear, which details some of the efforts behind the scenes to thwart the president’s more impulsive decisions, as well as an anonymous opinion piece published in the New York Times by “a senior official” in the White House. The piece claims a shadowy group of insiders has formed a so-called “resistance” and that they had considered invoking the 25th Amendment but decided not to in order to avoid “a constitutional crisis.”

To be clear, this will almost certainly not happen. Ejecting a president via the 25th Amendment is designed to be an extremely difficult process, which requires a majority of top officials, as well as the vice president, to sign on, and then needs support from two thirds of both houses of Congress. In other words, the odds are better that the president is struck by a meteorite.

An expulsion of this kind also, for the record, requires the leadership team to be actually sufficiently horrified by the actions of the Commander-in-Chief, which does not appear to be the case. The person who wrote the op-ed indicated excitement about the bulk of what has happened during Trump’s tenure. The writer thought the tax cuts and rapid deregulation were all great, and makes no mention of disasters like the still-ongoing family separation crisis or Trump’s response to Charlottesville (which we’ve learned he regrets walking back).

So take Warren’s comments for what they’re worth. And please, dear reader, never forget exactly what would happen if Trump is for whatever reason no longer in charge. Really think about it.