Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, together with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), held a press conference on Friday to introduce a bill to create a new body with an unwieldy name: the Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office. Widely perceived as a largely symbolic action to highlight President Trump’s muddled handling of his recent COVID-19 diagnosis, this bill would invoke Congress’s power under the Twenty‐fifth Amendment. In spite of the obvious timing, Pelosi insisted this bill is not about the current president. Raskin has proposed similar legislation earlier in Trump’s term, and the idea has come up sporadically over the decades.
President Trump’s fitness and immediate politics aside, is this bill a good idea? First, it’s important to understand the mechanics of the Twenty‐fifth Amendment. Among other provisions, this amendment—passed in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and previous presidential health crises—allows the president to temporarily transfer power to the vice president, correcting a dangerous oversight in the original Constitution. This provision, in Section 3 of the amendment, has been invoked on occasion when presidents underwent medical procedures requiring sedation.
Section 4 is designed to handle the possibility of a president who is incapacitated before he or she is able to voluntarily transfer power. This requires invocation by the vice president, who together with “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments [i.e. the Cabinet] or of such other body as Congress may by law provide” may transfer power. The amendment then sets up a procedure for Congress to decide the matter if the president disputes his claimed inability.
Since the Twenty‐fifth Amendment was ratified, Congress has never provided for “such other body,” leaving the decision with the fifteen members of the Cabinet. Raskin’s bill would change that by creating a bipartisan commission consisting of a mix of medical professionals and former senior executive branch officials.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/flawed-proposal-presidential-disability
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