Exit Strategy

There are three ways an American president can be removed from office other than being voted out:

1. Assassination
2. Impeachment 
3. 25th Amendment

Assassination: Unthinkable. My generation lost its three greatest heroes, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King jr. to assassination, and I never want to see that shock and pain visited on Americans again.

Impeachment: If only we had the gift of foresight. Had we any inkling of how far off the rails the unpresident would go, this would have been the best choice. But alas, the opportunity is past.

25th Amendment: The 25th has a provision whereby a president who has become unable to perform his duties can be involuntarily relieved of them. It's tricky and complicated, but not impossible.

In order to achieve removal, the vice-president and a majority of "the principal officers of the executive departments" (the Cabinet) have to vote to remove him temporarily from office.

Even if it were possible to get eight Cabinet members to vote for ouster, Mike Pence is the fly in the ointment. He would almost certainly vote no, but there's no indication his vote would count more than others, and a simple majority is all that is required.

But wait, there's more. The language of the amendment says the Cabinet members can be replaced by a majority "of such other body as Congress may by law provide." Neither size nor makeup of that body is specified.

OK, here's the thing: I know that Congress couldn't gear up to invoke the 25th Amendment before November. But if members of Congress got a lot of mail and email and tweets and phone calls reminding them that their first allegiance is to the Constitution and not to the president, and if the notion of using the 25th were to get enough attention, it could get some of them thinking about what they can and should do.

Right now, as any number of commentators have pointed out, the unpresident seems to be at a tipping point. With several current and former members of the government denouncing Trump, more Republicans might find the courage to come out against him.

The strategy is to keep pressure on. The goal is to make Trump unelectable.

I'm not delusional. I know this little blog and its loyal but small following isn't going to make huge changes by itself. But we all have friends, and belong to Facebook groups, and all our friends have friends, and if the Six Degrees of Separation theory works, who knows what could result?

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”*


--- Diogenes, 6/5/2020



* Attributed to Edmund Burke (1729-1797).