Jon Meacham: “Almost certainly, but we live in a world in which the outlandish (a President Trump) became a reality, so who’s to say where our political melodrama will end? It’s highly unlikely, but this unprecedented presidency could lead to unprecedented constitutional ground: the invocation of the boring-sounding yet world-shaking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.”
“We know, we know: it all sounds overheated, particularly when you consider that Vice President Mike Pence is one of Trump’s chief enablers and that the Cabinet officers all owe their place to Trump, whom they would be voting to humiliate. And yet the mechanics are in place, and the history of the question of presidential incapacity, and of the amendment itself, shows that lawmakers at midcentury anticipated a President whose instability might amount to disability. So why pass up a teachable moment to explore remote constitutional hypotheticals?”
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