Nancy Pelosi’s obsession by Byron York
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/nancy-pelosis-obsession
On Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced legislation to create what would be called the “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office.” The bill, written by one of Pelosi’s fellow Democrats, Rep. Jamie Raskin, would provide for the implementation of the 25th Amendment to remove a president deemed too incapacitated to carry out his or her responsibilities.
Pelosi, of course, led the Democratic effort to impeach and remove President Trump 11 months ago. For his part, Raskin has wanted to remove Trump from the get-go. He introduced a 25th Amendment bill in 2017, the first year of Trump’s presidency. He also took part in a Democratic effort on Jan. 6, 2017, before Trump was sworn in, to block the certification of votes for Trump in the Electoral College. On Dec. 6, 2017, Raskin joined 57 other House Democrats to vote to impeach Trump on the basis of the president’s statements about Colin Kaepernick and the NFL, among other things. Raskin was one of the original impeachers and, of course, enthusiastically supported impeachment when Pelosi took it up in 2019.
Now, Pelosi and Raskin claim their new 25th Amendment bill has nothing, nothing at all, to do with Trump. “This is not about President Trump,” Pelosi said at a news conference Friday. “He will face the judgment of the voters, but he shows the need for us to create a process for future presidents.”
Pelosi conceded that the bill, if it were to become law, would apply to the president who will be elected next month. That could, of course, be Trump. It could also be Democrat Joe Biden. But it seems doubtful that Pelosi and Raskin, Democrats who have pursued Trump relentlessly, would have taken the time, 24 days before the election, to introduce this bill if they felt absolutely, positively, 100% sure that Trump would not be reelected. So perhaps it would be wise to apply the famous “it’s not about the money” aphorism to Friday’s news conference: When someone says it’s not about Trump — it’s about Trump.
Indeed, Pelosi’s 25th Amendment gambit fits into her party’s efforts to remove Trump from office. Last December, when the speaker was racing to impeach the president by Christmas, she was asked why Democrats were in such a hurry. “One of the biggest criticisms of the process has been the speed at which the House Democrats are moving,” a reporter noted.
There was no hurry, Pelosi replied. “The speed?” she asked. “It’s been going on for 22 months, OK? Two and a half years, actually. This was two and a half years ago they initiated the Mueller investigation.”
With those words, Pelosi conceded that the effort to impeach Trump was about far more than a phone call with the president of Ukraine. It was a continuation of the Democrats’ long, long campaign to oust the president. Starting with the transition effort to decertify Trump’s Electoral College victory, it moved through early impeachment efforts, through the work of Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller, whose office served as the investigative arm of those Democrats who hoped to impeach the president over Russia, through the Ukraine matter, and all the way until the president’s Senate acquittal in February.**
On a few occasions, the president’s defenders believed Democrats had finally run out of gas in the effort to remove Trump. When the Mueller report failed to establish collusion and Mueller himself made a disastrous appearance on Capitol Hill, some Trump allies breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, they said, the long Russia nightmare was over. Little did they know that at that very moment, Democrats were advising a whistleblower who would bring the Ukraine charge over which Democrats would impeach the president. Then, when Trump was acquitted, another sigh of relief from Republicans. Again, they said: Finally, it’s over.
But it is never over, at least not as long as Trump is in the White House. Just a few weeks ago, Pelosi refused to rule out impeaching Trump again as a tactical move to stop the president from filling the Supreme Court vacancy. And now, she is talking about the 25th Amendment. The speaker’s actions suggest that getting rid of Trump has become an obsession. “You’re impeached forever,” she once said to Trump. Perhaps she will be impeaching forever.
There is absolutely no chance Pelosi’s 25th Amendment plan, were it in effect today, would result in the president’s removal. The amendment requires the vice president, in this case Vice President Mike Pence, to declare Trump unfit to serve. How likely does that seem? Then it requires a majority of the Trump Cabinet to agree. Again, not likely. But that is where Pelosi’s move comes in. The amendment requires either a majority of the Cabinet or a majority of “such other body as Congress may by law provide” to declare the president unfit. The Pelosi-Raskin bill would create that “other body,” the Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office. This is how the 25th Amendment describes what would happen:
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.
The bill says the commission will have 17 members. Four will be appointed by the House, two each by Democrats and Republicans, and four will be appointed by the Senate, in the same manner. The bill requires that all eight be physicians and that half of them be specialists in psychiatry. Then, there will be eight other members, four appointed by Democrats and four appointed by Republicans, who are former national officials at the highest levels — specifically, they must have served as president, vice president, secretary of state, attorney general, secretary of the treasury, secretary of defense, or surgeon general. The 17th and final member, the chairman, will be chosen by a majority vote of the 16 members, although there is no requirement that all 16 vote; a quorum of nine will be enough to hold a vote to select a chairman.
Pelosi is selling the commission as a means to remove politics from removing the president from office. “This isn’t about any judgment anybody has about somebody’s behavior,” she said. “This is about a diagnosis, a professional medical diagnosis.” Under the Democrats’ plan, she said, experts would make an entirely nonpolitical, expert decision about whether the president should be removed from office. And that would only happen if the vice president went along, she said. “The vice president is crucial to this,” Pelosi declared. And if the vice president went along with the experts, he or she would “immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President,” in the words of the 25th Amendment.
By Pelosi’s description, it would all be done in an entirely nonpolitical way, with physicians and nonpolitical politicians making a professional medical diagnosis about the president. But even if the commission recommends the president be removed from office, the president, under the 25th Amendment, has the right to object, to argue that he is fully able to carry out his duties. If that happens, the matter would go to Congress, where it would take a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate to keep the president out of power.
When she teased Thursday that she would offer a 25th Amendment proposal on Friday, Pelosi indicated that she was acting because of Trump. After a reporter asked about her views on the 25th Amendment, Pelosi said, “You take me back to my point. Mr. President, when was the last time you had a negative test before you tested positive? Why is the White House not telling the country that important fact about how this spread and made a hot spot of the White House?”
Eight months after Trump’s impeachment acquittal, Pelosi has again turned her thoughts to removing the president from office. Despite what increasingly appears to be an obsession with Trump, she argues that her 25th Amendment plan is “not about any of us making any sort of judgment about the president’s well-being” or “making a judgment on the basis of a comment or behavior that we don’t like.” Instead, removal would be based on a “medical decision” about the president.
Pelosi claims that her new action is based on concerns spurred by the coronavirus pandemic — what if the president were on a ventilator, Pelosi speculated, and could not act? But if that were the case, she surely could have acted earlier than eight months into the pandemic. And it is well known that, entirely apart from the virus, many of her supporters have suggested Trump is mentally ill and should be removed from office.
In any event, it is a fact that Pelosi’s move to provide for the removal of a president under the 25th Amendment comes after her long effort to remove the current president by impeachment. Perhaps that is just a coincidence. But as each day and week and month have gone by, Pelosi has shown the signs of being obsessed with removing Trump from office. If he is reelected, and she remains speaker of the House, it would be surprising if she did not try again. And now, she is making preparations, just in case.
** Much of this is discussed in my new book Obsession: The Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump, which is an in-depth look at the long campaign to remove Trump from office, from the origins of the Mueller investigation through the Senate acquittal.
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