Joe Biden's Decline, the 25th Amendment, and the Political Price
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The breaking of the emerta about President Biden's decline in office continues to jolt the political debate, raising questions about whether the 25th Amendment could have been deployed to remove him from office if necessary and what price the Democratic Party might pay for pretending he was fit as a fiddle.

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues James Taranto and Barton Swaim. The 25th Amendment, which clarified the Constitution's rules for presidential succession, was passed by Congress in 1965, two years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

One thing that lawmakers were worried about was if a president survived an attack like that or a stroke, but fell into a coma or lost the cognitive capacity to do the job. Hence Section 4 of the amendment, which provides a legal bypass when the president is, quote, unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, unquote.

This is catnip for pundits and screenwriters on shows like The West Wing or 24. But James, you have an op-ed in the Journal this week arguing that the 25th Amendment is not a very good fit for Joe Biden. How come? Well, Sections 1 through 3 of the 25th Amendment are fine. Section 4 is a contrivance that was developed in anticipation of the possibility that a president is unable to discharge his office.

Congress anticipated the possibility that there might be a disagreement between the president and his vice president and cabinet over whether he is unable. So it set up a mechanism for the president to challenge this determination.

So, what would happen is the president could be temporarily removed from office if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet members say that he's unable to perform his duties. The president could then appeal this essentially, give notice to Congress that he disputes this conclusion, and Congress has to vote. And for Congress to uphold the finding of disability requires a vote of two-thirds of both chambers, which means one-third of either chamber

34 senators or 146 representatives, assuming no vacancies, support the president. The president is back in power. So to underline that, you have two problems. First, you have that the initial declaration of disability has to be made by the vice president and the cabinet, all of whom are chosen and loyal to presumably the president of the United States. And then, James, this challenge by the president, my understanding is it could be repeated basically every three or four weeks.

And so if you have a president who is on a decline, age-related decline, has good days and bad days, on bad days, the cabinet and the vice president might go to the public and say, this person is not up to the job. And then on a good day, three weeks later, you could have a vote in Congress. And the president only needs...

a third of the Senate, essentially. Yeah, or the House. The biggest problem with this is the former problem, which is that triggering it requires collective action by the vice president and the cabinet. The vice president has to agree and the majority of the cabinet has to agree. And so all of these people who would expect to be loyal to the president have to agree. Now, we obviously saw why that was completely a non-starter during the Biden years when there was, it now seems clear, a massive cover-up

of just how seriously disabled he was. But even if you get to that point, you know, people imagine that the 25th Amendment simply provides for succession. It does, in the case, it does clarify the question that the original Constitution never quite answered. If something happens to the president, does the vice president become fully president? Yes.

But if the president is temporarily disabled, then the vice president only becomes acting president and the president can hang around and can be removed from office permanently only through death, resignation or impeachment and conviction. So there would be this phenomenon of hanging on. Something then happens to the vice president, the speaker of the House.

conceivably could become president. If the speaker is from the opposite party, you could see Democrats in Congress suddenly change their mind and decide they'd rather play weekend at Bernie's with Joe Biden to keep the White House formally in Democratic hands. So it raises all kinds of disturbing possibilities. It is not as well thought out as...

as the original Constitution was. And the prospect that you raise in this op-ed piece is a constitutional crisis, maybe, if Joe Biden had won the 2024 election, because you could have a cabinet that says he's not fit for office anymore, maybe after this recent prostate cancer diagnosis and his continuing difficulty in speaking, answering questions in the public. You could have Joe Biden saying he's not going to step down and he's going to challenge that. He still thinks he's OK. The vice president, meanwhile, is

acting president, but the vice president as acting president can't choose a new vice president. And so you then also have questions of what if something happened in that case to Kamala Harris? It gets pretty complicated pretty quickly. Yeah. And just to be clear, the acting president has all the powers of the president, including the power under Section 2 of the 25th Amendment to nominate a new vice president who then, as with Gerald Ford in 1973, is required to be confirmed by both houses of Congress. But...

The vice president is acting president cannot exercise that power because it's triggered only by a vacancy in the vice presidency. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment. ADP imagines a world of work where smart machines become too smart. Copier, I need 15 copies of this. Printing. By the way, irregardless, not a word, Janet. Yeah, I know. Page six should be regardless of or irrespective of. Just print them, please.

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Welcome back. Barton, your column this week is under the headline, Joe Biden was unfit in 2020. That gets to another of these debates that has been playing out in the public about if Joe Biden was on a decline, at what point did it become a real problem for doing the job? And your answer is clear there from the headline.

You talk about when you saw Joe Biden campaign in South Carolina. Just give listeners a sense of what you witnessed. Right. Well, we remember in 2019 when the Democratic primary was having debates with a lot of the candidates, it was pretty clear that Joe Biden was campaigning.

slower than he once was. And there were questions even then about whether he could get through debates and so on. And remember, at the time, we didn't know that he would be president. So I really wasn't shocked by his condition until I saw him in person at a campaign event in North Charleston, South Carolina.

This is before he won that primary and before the entire race turned in his direction. And so when he arrived, I think it was a Friday morning around 10 o'clock. He looked fine. But when he started speaking, I thought maybe he was having some kind of event. You couldn't understand what he was saying. His words were slurred. He clearly did not know why he was there. He didn't know the names of the people he was standing with.

And I left the event sort of shocked and thinking he can't possibly get through much more of this campaign. I saw him again the same night.

twice. The first time he was two hours late to an event, and I'm pretty sure that he was nearby in a campaign bus. Incidentally, I'll just say that one of the things that also shocked me when he was two hours late for this event was how incurious my fellow reporters were. I went around asking other reporters what they thought was going on, because what else are you going to do for two hours? And nobody seemed remotely curious about this fact. His staffers kept coming in, setting up a teleprompter.

Now, you've been to these events. Politicians at this level do not need a teleprompter to do a stump speech. The setting up of the teleprompter told me that somebody on the other side thought, we don't know if he can get through this without just reading a prepared statement. Now, in the event he didn't use a teleprompter, he probably should have because he sounded terrible. And I will say, the following day in Georgetown, South Carolina, he seemed fine. I mean,

older and slower, but fine. He was clearly with it. He was making jokes. So to your point about good days and bad days, there are definitely some. But this was my original sense of shock and dismay about his condition. When I filed the piece, as I wrote this week, back in 2020, you know, I didn't know that he would be president. So I didn't devote the entire piece to that subject and confined it to a couple of paragraphs.

But the idea, and this has been commonplace among right-leaning observers for years, it was obvious years and years ago that Joe Biden was not fit mentally or physically to be in the presidency.

I think it's a kind of disturbing reflection of the fact that Democrats and liberals don't know or care what Republicans are saying, or if they hear it, they just completely discount it. So that was my experience. It's interesting that you say that about seeing Biden on successive days, because I saw him a little bit before you did, before the Iowa caucus at a couple of events yesterday.

And he was clearly old, maybe too old to be running for president. But I did not see any sort of glitches that made me think he was anything like the recent 2024 debate that blew up his recent campaign. I talked to one voter who said that he thought there were four candidates that spoke that day and he thought Biden's speech was the worst.

But he was going to vote for him anyway. And that is one of the troubles, I think, with this sort of age-related decline is it becomes difficult to draw an exact line. As many people know personally, when you have the conversation, when do you take the car keys away from grandma or grandpa? That is a difficult question to know the answer to always, though it bears saying, I think, that there's no good day

as president of the United States in the Oval Office to have an issue where you're having a bad day. The other thing that I think is notable about this conversation, Barton, is remember the context of the 2024 campaign. It seems in retrospect and historically

a little bit at the time even, that many Democrats felt like they were sort of trapped in their options because they were panicked that the other guy who was running near frontrunner in this Democratic primary was avowed socialist Bernie Sanders.

And remember, there was that moment where on two days in a row, Pete Buttigieg dropped out and then Amy Klobuchar dropped out and endorsed Biden. There was a sense that this is our only option if we want to prevent Bernie from getting the nomination. And presumably what they feared was a blowout in the November election. And then also kind of a similar dynamic in 2024, reporting that Joe Biden was concerned that

that if he didn't run, Kamala Harris would not be a successful candidate, would not win the election against Donald Trump. But yet obvious problems if the Democratic Party decided to have a primary and threw overboard the first female and the first black vice president.

And so that is part of what is driving the dynamic, I think, Barton, is the sense that even Democrats off the record or behind closed doors were worried about Joe Biden. They were worried more about their other options. Well, that's right. And I think a couple of things worked together.

very much in Biden's favor. The first was that the COVID lockdown started in mid-March, not long after Super Tuesday. And of course, Biden had racked up a lot of victories, but still, he had lost the first two primaries very badly. Under normal circumstances, it would not have been entirely clear that Biden was the runaway nominee. But once the lockdown started happening, especially on the Democratic side, the campaign just froze in place.

And that worked in his favor. And you allude to the other thing, which is there was a narrative in the press at the time that racial minority voters in South Carolina had effectively chosen Biden. And the party's internal compulsions, I think, made it very hard to move in a different direction once that narrative set in. So we talk a lot about Donald Trump being lucky, but Joe Biden was sure lucky in those few months of that campaign. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment.

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Welcome back. One related piece of news we should talk about. On Monday, we discussed Joe Biden's diagnosis of stage four cancer. A lot of questions related to the timeline of that. And on Tuesday, a Biden spokesman offered some clarifications. Here is what part of the statement. President Biden's last known PSA, meaning prostate specific antigen test, was in 2014.

Prior to Friday, President Biden had never been diagnosed with prostate cancer. So, James, a couple of thoughts there. One is trying to tamp down on speculation that the cancer diagnosis or at least suspicions happened while the president was in the Oval Office. And then two, answering questions about this PSA test. Many presidents have had PSA tests. Donald Trump had one, I think, last month and the White House released the results yesterday.

There are some arguments, recommendations that men over 70 not get the PSA test in part because their risk of mortality is already high. So you may end up finding and treating cancers that are not the ultimate cause of death for that individual. But James, remarkable if the whole time the president was in the Oval Office,

He did not have that test given, I think, the expectation of many Americans, many voters is that the president's care is top notch, if not a full body MRI all the time. Pretty close to that. Yeah, it seems odd. And my main reaction to this is that after we saw what happened with Biden's incapacity, we have to assume that they're lying to us.

We also know that Joe Biden helped cover up the cancer of his son, Beau, who was attorney general of Delaware. So there's a history of that sort of cover up, too. That said, I'm less troubled by the cancer than I am by the dementia, because if you have cancer—

And, you know, Ronald Reagan had cancer when he was president. Colon cancer was operable. But that's something where it's, you know, it's fairly discreet and easy to deal with. And you can make a determination about presidential disability and invoke Section 3 of the 25th Amendment in which the president acknowledges that he's temporarily unable and hands over his authority. That's what Reagan did when he had surgery for colon cancer. George W. Bush did it when he had a colonoscopy.

With dementia, though, that is a case in which, yes, somebody with dementia may have good days and bad days. But the nature of dementia is such that the person who's suffering from it doesn't necessarily recognize when he's having bad days. That has to be determined by people outside and is often in denial about the condition to begin with.

And I would just point out this. You mentioned that the 25th Amendment was proposed in 1965. At that time, the oldest president who had ever served was Dwight Eisenhower, who was 69, just shy of his 70th birthday when he left office. So we'd never had a septuagenarian president. We've now had three. Ronald Reagan later suffered from dementia, and there's some thought that he might have had

the beginnings of it late in his second term. Biden pretty clearly seems to have it pretty seriously. Trump seems to be very lucky. We've seen him face to face, and there's no indication that he's slowed down at all. But at that age, it really can be hit and miss. I take that point about the dementia being a bigger concern for the person who has the nuclear codes than the prostate cancer. But Barton, particularly given that Biden was asking voters to

to give him another term, to keep him in office until age 86. And particularly given some of the medical assessments that you hear, that most prostate cancers are slow growing, and that he probably had this for a while. I do think that President Biden ought to offer the public a little more explanation here. Did he discuss

this PSA test with his doctor? Did he decline it? Were the doctors okay with that? Did they push back on it? Because those doctors, remember, certified in a letter as recently as February of 2024 that Biden was fit to serve. Well, I agree with you in theory, but any explanation forthcoming from that administration, I would completely discount. They seem to have

lied their way through this entire issue and have no credibility, which I think raises a lot of questions about the future politically. And I think there's a growing belief among Democrats that Joe Biden cost them the 2024 election by pulling out so late or being forced to drop out so late. Now, I don't think that that's necessarily true. I think that he's

He would have lost anyway, even with a weakened Trump as his opponent, because his record was terrible. And no matter when he pulled out, I think Kamala Harris would have lost because she's a terrible politician who was attached to that terrible record.

So I'm not a Democrat. So on the Democratic side, that belief is very strong from what I can sense. And in 2028 and the years leading up to it, I think there's a real opportunity for some Democrats who are not tainted with that debacle, the cover up of Biden's infirmities to

to make the case that the party needs a fresh leader who is not part of that sort of establishmentarian cabal. Maybe Westmore, Maryland, or one of the other governors. The trouble there is it would be risky. And I'm on record as saying the Democrats' big problem right now is that they're afraid to take risks.

And that would be a big one for whoever tried it. But I think there's room there for a new character to take the helm of the party. And remember that sticking with Biden was a risk averse move until it wasn't. They were afraid of throwing the nomination open and having an ugly fight or going with Kamala Harris, who they knew would be a bad candidate. But on that point about the Democratic Party's political future, we have an email here from a listener, Rob Schultz.

who sounds like he is no fan of either of the two major party nominees last time. He says, sometimes I think Trump has lost it based on what comes out of his mouth, but he's also on sparing about Biden. He says, anyone who was part of that administration and in leadership in the Democratic Party will never get my vote in any election.

He goes on to say, was this a difficult situation? Yes, for sure. But have the courage to do the right thing for the country, folks. Not to mention the party, as I believe this will haunt the Democrats for many years to come. And James, we'll give you the last word. I wonder what you make of that. I mean, I'm of two minds on one hand.

I get the point. And maybe this will be a factor in the next Democratic Party primary. Somebody who was in the administration like Pete Buttigieg having difficulty explaining sometimes what exactly he saw of Biden and why he didn't say anything. And maybe a leg up for some outsider like Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer, who can say I was fifteen hundred or a thousand miles away when all this was taking place.

On the other hand, I also remember the assessments of the Republican Party's future after January 6th, that this would be a big hole for the GOP to climb out of. And three or four years is a long time amid a border crisis and 9 percent inflation. Voter minds can change pretty quickly. Well, you know what was a big hole for the Republicans to climb out of was the Iraq war.

And the way they climbed out of that was Trump came in in 2016. And in a debate in South Carolina, he just laced into Jeb Bush and said, your brother lied us into war and all that. And I remember we were all shocked by that. But it was actually kind of effective. It purged the Republicans of that memory, which I think it demoralized them, because I think for a lot of Republican voters, the Iraq war had led to eight years out of power to Obamacare and all the rest of it.

And the Democrats may need somebody like that, somebody who comes in and confronts the other Democrats and says, look what you guys did. Thank you, James and Barton. Thank you all for listening. You can send your own emails to pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button. And we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch.

Isn't home where we all want to be? Reba here for realtor.com, the pros number one most trusted app. Finding a home is like dating. You're searching for the one. With over 500,000 new listings every month, you can find the one today.

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