Did Biden’s cabinet members think that the 25th Amendment was in the Constitution just for decoration?
Hey, guess which words are missing from CNN’s writeup of former Biden cabinet officials telling Jake Tapper that after 2023, they basically stopped seeing the president?
“25th Amendment.”
If the sitting president goes cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, or has some other circumstance that makes it impossible for him to adequately perform his duties, the vice president and the president’s cabinet are supposed to step in and declare that he can no longer perform the role and declare the vice president is taking over. It’s right there in the Constitution, and it has been there since 1967:
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
It’s one thing if the president’s meetings with members of Congress, foreign leaders, or ordinary citizens grow rarer and shorter. That’s bad, but that’s not a constitutional crisis. But if a president is deliberately avoiding meetings with his cabinet, he’s not around the only people who are empowered by our Constitution to recognize the problems in the president’s mental capacities and take action. (Again, Joe Biden struggled to remember the names of top aides since 2022, and forgot Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s name in an interview shortly before withdrawing from the race.)
From CNN’s writeup:
“Access dropped off considerably in 2024, and I didn’t interact with him as much,” said one Cabinet secretary, who explained that instead of briefing Biden, the secretary would brief other senior White House aides, who then briefed the president. . .
A third Cabinet secretary told Tapper and Thompson that Biden’s top aides “shielded him in every meeting.” From October 2023 on, “the cabinet was kept at bay,” this secretary said.
“For months, we didn’t have access to him. There was clearly a deliberate strategy by the White House to have him meet with as few people as necessary,” the third Cabinet secretary told the authors.
“At one rare meeting during that time,” the authors write that the third secretary “was shocked by how the president was acting. He seemed ‘disoriented’ and ‘out of it,’ his mouth agape.”
Didn’t that seem troubling to them? Yes, every cabinet member always thinks he isn’t getting enough face-to-face time with the president, but Biden had no in-person cabinet meetings from October 2, 2023, to September 20, 2024. Didn’t that seem weird to these cabinet officials? Did these cabinet members think that the 25th Amendment was in the Constitution just for decoration?
If the president is “disoriented” “out of it,” and generally unavailable . . . why would these cabinet officials think he was able to discharge the powers and duties of his office?