Donald Trump, the president who fancied himself a “very stable genius,” shows very little of that stability these days. More than 80 Democratic members of Congress have called for invoking the 25th Amendment to sideline him.

Trump’s vice president and a majority of his Cabinet are the only ones who could actually exercise their powers under the amendment and suspend Trump as president. With this vice president and this Cabinet, that’s like expecting the cast of a puppet show to overthrow the man controlling the strings.

That said, talk of the 25th Amendment is serious. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the astute ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has filed legislation (HR 8275) to create a bipartisan, professionally qualified 17-member standing Commission on Presidential Capacity to determine if a president is unable to carry out the powers and duties of his office.

That needs to pass — if not by this Congress, which is unlikely, then as a first order of business for the next one. That would necessitate electing a Democratic Congress in November.

HR 8275 completes what Congress left undone when it approved the 25th Amendment by overwhelming bipartisan votes in 1965.

One purpose, inspired by the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, was to fill vacancies in the office of vice president. The Congress also had in mind President Woodrow Wilson’s paralyzing stroke in 1919 and President Eisenhower’s serious illnesses, including a heart attack that disabled him for six weeks.

The president can invoke it

Section 3 of the 25th provides for presidents themselves to invoke it, as several have in anticipation of surgery and anesthesia, by briefly transferring their duties to the vice president.

Section 4 anticipates dealing with a president who needs to step aside and refuses. He or she could be compelled to do so by the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet, or by the vice president and “such other body” as Congress might create, but never has.

Raskin’s commission would be that “other body.” The vice president would still have the decisive vote. In each case, a president could contest the action and appeal to Congress, which could suspend the president from office by a two-thirds vote of each chamber.

The Founders apparently thought the impeachment process would accommodate all eventualities. They could not foresee how inadequate that would be in an age when a president’s whim could extinguish millions of lives in an instant.

A letter from seven psychiatrists to congressional leadership elaborated on the danger.

‘A whole civilization will die’

“The president’s recent public communications have been, by any normal standard of political discourse, alarming,” they wrote. “His posts demanding that Iran ‘open the f——’ strait, you crazy b——’, and his threat to bomb Iran ‘back to the stone ages,’ adding that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,’ are not the rhetoric of calculated geopolitical pressure.

“They are the expressions of a man in profound psychological distress who is reaching for the most extreme retaliatory threats available to him. That these statements were addressed to an adversary in the context of an active military confrontation makes them not merely shocking but profoundly dangerous.”

Trump’s behavior, though often bizarre and detached from reality (as after he lost the 2020 election), reached new extremes by also attacking the pope and posting an AI-generated impression of himself as Jesus.

The president has become increasingly erratic, and the public has noticed. In a Reuters/Ipsos survey of 4,638 adults two months ago, 61% agreed that Trump has “become erratic with age” and only 45% considered him “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges” while 49% disagreed. But among Republicans, 81% were still seeing him through rose-colored glasses. They can’t see in Trump the unfitness he relished imputing to former President Joe Biden.

A president’s mental state wouldn’t have been so critical back when wars were fought with sailing ships and muzzle-loading muskets. In our times, whether a demented president would order an unwarranted nuclear attack is just one ominous concern. Another is whether he would be unable to respond to a nuclear attack in time — which could be as short as 10 minutes.

As Raskin said, “We are at a dangerous precipice.”

Raskin’s legislation has 85 co-sponsors, all of them Democrats. None is from Florida, which is inexplicable.

It is unrealistic, perhaps, to expect Republicans to support Raskin’s legislation or even allow it to become law while they are still in thrall to Trump.

Nonetheless, the question of how to make the 25th Amendment meaningful is no longer idle or theoretical. It belongs in the forefront of everyone’s mind and in the November election campaign.

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