How to Get Rid of a President by David Priess

Author:David Priess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

DECLARING A PRESIDENTIAL disability is one of the ways to separate a person from the chief executive’s office, on top of voting them out and waiting for them to die, that receives mention in the Constitution. As the case of Woodrow Wilson exposes, its application under the founders’ original design was fraught with practical difficulties.

ONLY IN THE final weeks of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 did the delegates tackle the issue of presidential succession and, with it, what to do if a chief executive became unable to do the job. A committee that had been created in July to draft a working document from discussions up to that point inserted placeholder text naming the president of the Senate as a temporary fill-in if a president developed a disability. James Madison and others on August 27 quibbled over the details, challenging in particular who should act for the president; suggestions ranged from the chief justice to a presidential council.

Then John Dickinson of Pennsylvania voiced two fundamental issues, asking, “What is the extent of the term ‘disability’?” and “Who is to be the judge of it?” His questions must have been too hard to handle, because delegates quickly threw the issue to another committee tasked to address postponed topics.35 That group, in turn, came back in early September with text describing a new position, the vice president—who, upon the president’s “inability to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” would “exercise those powers and duties until another President be chosen, or until the inability of the President be removed.” Subsequent attention focused more on the means of selecting this backup leader than the barely discussed clause on “disability” (a term the delegates usually used interchangeably with “inability”).36

The final text related to disability eventually read, in the Constitution’s article 2, section 1: “In the case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President.” It allowed Congress to pass laws providing for who should act as president if both the president and vice president were removed, adding “such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President be selected.”

That sounds straightforward. But a few problems quickly emerged. First, as the country in 1841 had been forced to confront, the section’s phrasing was ambiguous. Did the delegates want the vice president to take on the powers and duties of the office but not actually be the president? (This is most constitutional scholars’ interpretation of the founders’ intent.) Or did they think the vice president should become a fully loaded president, as John Tyler convinced them to accept? Second, the words “In the case of… Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office” remain painfully unhelpful on Dickinson’s key questions: What constitutes a disability—and who decides?

In the early years of the republic, the issue was moot. Citizens and especially rival partisans questioned some presidents’ suitability for office, but they didn’t try to remove them due to a disability.

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