Hearings show why Trump should have been removed
By George T. Conway III / Special to The Washington Post
The hearings of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection have prompted a great deal of discussion about whether Donald Trump should be criminally charged for his attempted self-coup. You can count me as being on Team Prosecution, but there’s another important issue raised by the hearings: the effective operation of Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to future presidencies.
Fortunately, the committee has been focused on that critical point from the outset of its work. Its earliest requests for materials asked for “all documents and communications related to the mental stability of Donald Trump or his fitness for office” and those related “to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
The 25th Amendment, in particular Section 4, is the constitutional provision that details what happens when a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” It could and should have been invoked to bring Trump’s calamitous presidency to an early and safe end.
Think of it: Our president — the person in charge of the world’s second-largest arsenal of thermonuclear weaponry — was so apparently unstable that, as Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in their book “Peril” and Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker recounted in their book, “I Alone Can Fix It,” the speaker of the House was compelled to call the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Jan. 8, 2021, to say about Trump, “He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time.” She expressed concern that the crazy-man-in-chief could unilaterally launch a doomsday strike.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-fearings-show-why-trump-should-have-been-removed/
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