"We both believed that the best outcome was a normal transition of power, which was working, and neither one of us contemplated in any serious format the 25th Amendment."

"The only research I did out of curiosity was I googled it. I remember my general counsel asking me if we wanted him to do extensive research on it. I said, no, not at this point."

Said Steven Mnuchin, quoted "Jan. 6 transcript: Mnuchin briefly discussed 25th Amendment removal of Trump" (The Hill).

 "We both believed" referred to Mnuchin and Mike Pompeo.

"The president is not well at all mentally. I think he’s an extreme narcissist... he is having a hissy fit... He does need to be removed under the 25th Amendment."

Said Richard Painter, just last night on MSNBC.

So the idea lives on.

ADDED: Incoherently, the "hissy fit" Painter is hissing about is the use of emergency power, but the argument against that has to do with narrow interpretation of the Constitution, and Painter is relying on a broad interpretation when it comes to the 25th Amendment. This is a contradiction I talked about and did a poll about 4 days ago in "Want to be able to do things the easy way or not?"

The poll gave you 5 options:

Yes, bypass Congress with emergency powers for the wall and the 25th am. to oust even a non-incapacitated President. [1% of 625 of you voted for this option.]

No, you have to do it the hard way, legislation to fund the wall and impeachment to oust a non-incapacitated President. [40%]

Use emergency powers for the wall, but not the 25th to oust a non-incapacitated President. [45%]

No to emergency powers for the wall, but yes to the 25th instead of impeachment. [1%]

A more subtle balancing of factors is needed, so none of the above. [13%]

Isn't if funny that Painter is being irrational just as he's making a pronouncement about the President's rationality?

Want to be able to do things the easy way or not?

Tweets Alan Dershowitz this morning.

It is unconstitutional to use the 25th Amendment to circumvent impeachment provisions. The 25th can be used only if POTUS is physically or psychiatrically incapacitated. Any other use is unconstitutional. I challenge anyone to argue differently'

And here he is last night on Tucker Carlson, saying the same thing much more vehemently (replete with the word "treason"):



Meanwhile:

Trump just said; “I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster.”

Whatever a national emergency may be, that’s not it.

That quote is going right in the lawsuit. https://t.co/FzwS4xIaMw

— Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) February 15, 2019

Want to be able to do things the easy way or not?

Yes, bypass Congress with emergency powers for the wall and the 25th am. to oust even a non-incapacitated President.

No, you have to do it the hard way, legislation to fund the wall and impeachment to oust a non-incapacitated President.

Use emergency powers for the wall, but not the 25th to oust a non-incapacitated President.

No to emergency powers for the wall, but yes to the 25th instead of impeachment.

A more subtle balancing of factors is needed, so none of the above.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Poll results:

"McCabe Says Justice Officials Discussed Recruiting Cabinet Members to Push Trump Out of Office."

The NYT reports on an interview with Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director. According to McCabe, "top Justice Department officials were so alarmed by President Trump’s decision in May 2017 to fire James B. Comey, the bureau’s director, that they discussed whether to recruit cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office."

The interview (with Scott Pelley) is scheduled to run on "60 Minutes" this weekend, and McCabe is promoting a book. My first question is how serious was the discussion. All sorts of things are discussed in passing. Lots of people "discussed" the 25th Amendment in the early days of the Trump presidency, the idea being that Trump was mentally ill.

Mr. McCabe is the first person involved in these meetings who has spoken publicly about them. Mr. Pelley said, “They were counting noses. They were not asking cabinet members whether they would vote for or against removing the president, but they were speculating ‘This person would be with us, this person would not be,’ and they were counting noses in that effort....This was not perceived to be a joke,” Mr. Pelley added....

Funny that the key quotes come from Pelley, not McCabe.

Trump has tweeted this reaction:

Disgraced FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe pretends to be a “poor little Angel” when in fact he was a big part of the Crooked Hillary Scandal & the Russia Hoax - a puppet for Leakin’ James Comey. I.G. report on McCabe was devastating. Part of “insurance policy” in case I won....

The NYT doesn't elaborate on why anyone could have seriously thought the 25th Amendment applied. Looking back to early 2017 in my archive, I see that a couple writers at The New Yorker were pushing the Trump-is-insane theory of the applicability of the 25th Amendment. On May 8, 2017, I pointed to Evan Osnos. Excerpt:

"Rosenstein Suggested He Secretly Record Trump and Discussed 25th Amendment."

NYT headline.

The deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, suggested last year that he secretly record President Trump in the White House to expose the chaos consuming the administration, and he discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office for being unfit....

Mr. Rosenstein was just two weeks into his job. He had begun overseeing the Russia investigation and played a key role in the president’s dismissal of Mr. Comey by writing a memo critical of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. But Mr. Rosenstein was caught off guard when Mr. Trump cited the memo in the firing, and he began telling people that he feared he had been used.

Mr. Rosenstein made the remarks about secretly recording Mr. Trump and about the 25th Amendment in meetings and conversations with other Justice Department and F.B.I. officials. Several people described the episodes, insisting on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations....

Thanks to commenter readering for saying — on my post about the "Battle of Brett" Drudge graphic — "Much better Drudge headline now."



Drudge rarely uses the siren in recent years, so it has a big impact now.

Who barged where in the G20 photograph?

Clearly (and hilariously) it was Macron:



French President Emmanuel Macron goes way out of his way, jostling past numerous world leaders to get to stand next to Donald Trump. Angela Merkel, planted in the center front row, actively reaches out to him, but he's dead set on task and makes it to the extreme right, where Donald Trump had positioned himself.

But look how Newsweek presents the same photo op: "IN G20 PHOTO, TRUMP COULDN’T SHOVE HIS WAY TO THE FRONT AND CENTER OF WORLD LEADERS." The video there shows an earlier point in the assembling on the risers, but it's easy to see that Trump makes no attempt to get to the front and center position. He steps calmly to the end position and casually speaks to a few people. He does nothing that makes it seem as though he wants to be in the center, and he certain doesn't engage in any shoving. It's Macron that actively moves through the crowd (and "shove" would be the wrong word even for what Macron is doing).

I'm imagining how Newsweek would defend itself against the charge that this is fake news: Trump didn't shove his way to the front and center, because he couldn't. He would've if he could've. Since he didn't, that means he couldn't, so we reported that he couldn't.

That's not a logical defense, of course. It contains a glaring false premise. But it might work for hardcore Trump haters, who are deranged into thinking they are seeing the deranged mind of Donald Trump. Oh, man, he so needs to be in the center of everything, him with his narcissistic personality disorder. We need to move on him with the 25th Amendment before the world explodes.

IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula writes: "Doesn't matter where trump is standing. He can drink their milkshakes from any location in the room." (Milkshake meme discussed yesterday here.)

ADDED: According to this AP report, the positions were all predetermined by rules that put all the government leaders in the front row and, within that row, arranged them by senority.

Trump wound up on one of the outer edges, between Indonesian President Joko Widodo and French President Emmanuel Macron, who has even less seniority than Trump does after being elected in May. Trump took office in January.

There is a reference to an photo op in May (among NATO leaders) in which "Trump put his right hand on the right arm of Montenegro Prime Minister Dusko Markovic and thrust himself ahead as NATO leaders walked inside the alliance's new headquarters and prepared for a group photo." Newsweek didn't refer to that earlier incident, but it could have attempted to justify saying "Trump couldn't shove his way to the front." He "thrust" (shoved?) his way to the front in the past, but this time set rules eliminated the shoving option. Here's the Trump vs. Markovic video:



What do you think? Shoving? Thrusting?

Well? What did Trump do to Dusko Markovic?

He shoved.

He thrusted.

He did some firm but gentle repositioning.

He carefully and respectfully maintained a clear path for himself.

Dusko received a desirable, memorable, delicious clasp from the most powerful man in the world.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Poll results:

Wait. I thought the Civil War was inevitable and no President could have averted it.

"Just before Franklin Pierce took office, in 1853, his son died in a train accident, and Pierce’s Presidency was marked by the 'dead weight of hopeless sorrow,' according to his biographer Roy Franklin Nichols. Morose and often drunk, Pierce proved unable to defuse the tensions that precipitated the Civil War."

So writes Evan Osnos in a New Yorker article that considers, among other things, whether the 25th Amendment procedure (for removing a President who is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office") could be used against a President with a psychiatric disorder.

But last week, Trump was sneered at as ignorant (if not racist) for saying that Andrew Jackson, if he'd been around "a little later" would have prevented the Civil War.

Jim Grossman (American Historical Association): [Trump] starts from the wrong premise - the premise that the Civil War should somehow have been avoided, and that someone more skilled on the White House could have avoided it. If one sees the Civil War as a war of liberation, which is what it was, then it shouldn't have been avoided. Had you compromised out the differences between the government and the confederacy, or between anti-slavery forces and southern slaveholders, the victims would have been the enslaved people of the south. If the president has the notion that it would be desirable to compromise that out, without emancipation, it is frightening.

David Blight (Yale): If it reflects anything, it reflects a kind of great man idea of history, that if you just have the right man with the right strength you can change the course of history. And that is plain nonsense.

In that view, what's the problem with hopelessly depressed, drunk Franklin Pierce?

By the way, the historians were also contemptuous of Trump's statement that Jackson "was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War."

Grossman: Jackson died 16 years before the Civil War began. You can quote me on that.

Blight: He was dead even before the compromise of 1850 for God's sake. He was dead at the time of the Mexican war....

This contempt led me to read "AMERICAN LION: Andrew Jackson in the White House." Here are a few excerpts that show people in Jackson's time speaking of civil war:

The most interesting sentence in George Packer's musing about whether Trump is insane enough to be removed under the procedure set forth in the 25th Amendment.

"The gaudy gold drapery of the East Room contributed to the impression that at any moment Trump might declare himself President for Life, and a flunky would appear from behind the curtain to pin the Medal of National Greatness on his suit jacket, while, backstage, officials and generals discussed his overthrow."

So let me get this straight — who's crazy?

"I wonder if that family of ticks in my yard knows that they're going to change the Tennessee state Constitution as a result of their actions."

I was just about to create an "Insects and the Law" tag... and I was getting some big ideas about teaching an Insects and the Law course at the law school. (You know about my longstanding interest in insect politics.) But then I thought: Hey, wait a minute. Ticks are not insects. And all my grandiose ideas came crashing down at 6:44 a.m.

I confirmed my suspicion by consulting Tikipedia. Arachnid! Will there be enough posts to justify an "Arachnids and the Law" tag? The thing about tags is that you don't want them to be too small, but they shouldn't get too big either. Something that will have 5 to 35 posts -- that's the target zone. I'm thinking Arthropods and the Law. And then just a plain old arachnids tag.

Anyway, the quote in the title is from this news article, which is linked by Glenn Reynolds, in a post about -- naturally -- the Blagojevich controversy.

(We need a cute name for the Blagomess. Blagosmear? Not Blagogate. The opportunities are too ripe to squander on another "-gate." Blag-oh-no.)

Glenn agrees with me about the interpretation of the provision of the Illinois constitution that the state attorney general, Lisa Madigan, is trying to use to push Governor Blagojevich aside without the troublesome safeguards of the impeachment process. Glenn worked on an amendment to the Tennessee constitution that is analogous to the provision Madigan has seized upon in what I consider to be an illicit power grab.

The Tennessee amendment was the consequence of a tick bite: Governor Phil Bredesen got quite sick after an arachnid attack, and it was decided that there needed to be a procedure to transfer power in case the governor becomes incapacitated.

There's also a provision in the United States Constitution, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment:

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.

You may remember the dramatic moment in the movie "Air Force One" -- spoiler alert -- when Secretary of Defense Dean Stockwell tries to use the 25th Amendment to oust President Harrison Ford, and Vice President Glenn Close refuses to sign.

Now, I've finally gotten Glenn Reynolds and Glenn Close together in one post -- with ticks. I think that says something about my authority to say that these constitutional provisions are about dealing with physical incapacity -- including unconsciousness and brain damage -- not with political and legal problems, however severe.

Impeachment has important procedural safeguards that should not be bypassed, and the importance of the protections of constitutional process is not diminished by an opinion that the executive in question is a blood-sucking tick.

IN THE COMMENTS: BlogDog coins "Blago-a-gogo."