For about four years, talk of invoking the 25th Amendment was all the rage in corporate media circles. Those four years — from early 2017 to late 2020 — just happened to coincide with Donald Trump’s time in office as the 45th president of the United States.
When they weren’t cheerleading Trump’s impeachment, they were fascinated by the possibilities of the 25th remedy, as improbable as it was.
Now the left has its man, even if that man doesn’t always quite seem to know where he is, why he’s there, or who he is. Count the many ways President Joe Biden has stumbled near the line of incapacitation, and it’s amazing to think how radio silent the accomplice media have been on the subject of the 25th Amendment over the past few years.
Remarkable, really.
The good folks at NewsBustersNewsBusters, the conservative watchdog committed to documenting and exposing bias in corporate media, found more than 600 search results — on Nexis alone — for “25th amendment” between 2018 and early 2021. That only includes TV transcripts. And NewsBusters left out of that search clips from 2017, which was dominated by Trump removal talk.
The website, a project of the Media Research Center, put together a hilarious (and sad) montage of video clips from Trump-hating “journalists” breathlessly invoking the post-Kennedy assassination amendment outlining the method to fill the office of president or VP in case of death, resignation, removal, or incapacitation. Ratified in 1967, the amendment establishes that the vice president and a majority of cabinet members may declare the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
The disability and succession amendment also allows Congress to enact a law to create another body to determine the removal of the president on the grounds of disability. Think of it as a kind of constitutionally approved coup.
Perhaps no one uttered the phrase that paid for the left more than former West Wing writer and MSNBC sack of leftist conspiracy theories Lawrence O’Donnell. The NewsBusters video, fittingly, includes 25 clips of O’Donnell saying “25th Amendment.”
“This man was talking about the 25th Amendment within less than a month of Trump taking office, and he spent the next three and a half years bragging about how early he’d brought it up,” wrote Bill D’Agostino, media editor for NewsBusters and senior research analyst for the Media Research Center’s news analysis division.
CNN, MSNBC, and the usual suspects at the networks sucked up lots of airtime with their “experts” accusing Trump of all manner of mental and social maladies that they insisted should disqualify him under the amendment’s removal section.
‘Significant Limitations’
Interestingly enough, as the world has watched Biden’s steep cognitive decline on display daily, it’s ixnay on the old 25th Amendment talk.
We don’t just have to believe our own stunned eyes and ears, though.
Special Counsel Robert Hur, of Biden’s own U.S. Department of Justice, insisted the president’s criminal mishandling of classified documents, some “implicating sensitive intelligence,” didn’t warrant charges. Why? Because the 81-year-old president is a doddering, old fool.
“Mr. Biden’s memory,” the report asserted, “appeared to have significant limitations.”
Twenty-Fifth Amendment-style limitations? Maybe. Maybe not. But the corporate media don’t want to go there.
Why?
“Because the president’s a Democrat,” D’Agostino told me last week on “Need to Know with Jeff Angelo” on WHO radio in Des Moines. “Biden is a good regime participant. He plays ball with the right people. He’s kind of a dream for a lot of the people in power because he’s virtually a blank slate with very few aspirations or morals aside from the attainment and the retention of power.”
Accordingly, the notable mentions of the 25th Amendment about Biden that NewsBusters has tracked on SnapStream or Nexis have been “Republicans Pounce!” stories, D’Agostino said. His recent piece notes “CNN News Central” host Sara Sidner, in reporting on Hur’s report, said:
Now the GOP lawmakers are using this as a springboard to call for Biden’s removal from office under the 25th Amendment. The House GOP leadership saying, quote, ‘He is certainly unfit for the Oval Office.’
The 25th Amendment talk — at least the accomplice media springing into action to defend the Democrat Party’s Big Giant Head — should heat up in the coming days.
U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, a squishy Colorado Republican who was one of three House GOP members to vote against the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and temporarily forestall the effort, introduced a resolution on Monday calling on Biden’s cabinet to send the octogenarian packing via the 25th Amendment.
“The Hur report officially addressed what many Americans have long witnessed with their own eyes — that President Biden is no longer fit to successfully discharge the critical duties of his office,” Buck wrote in a statement to The Hill. “Numerous instances were articulated in the report, and have played out in full public view, showing President Biden’s apparent cognitive decline and lack of mental stamina.”
A recent Newsweek poll found that more than a third of U.S. adults surveyed support invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Biden from office. Perhaps those numbers aren’t surprising given that poll after poll shows the vast majority of Democrats don’t even want Biden to run for a second term.
There is a big problem with removing Biden from office, however, and the corporate media are well aware of it. The 25th Amendment, first tested amid the turmoil of the final days of the Nixon administration, clearly establishes who’s next in line for the presidency.
“Nobody’s asking for a President [Kamala] Harris here,” D’Agostino said.
Listen to the complete interview with NewsBusters’ Bill D’Agostino.
