Let’s say Trump loses bigly, as he might say. He loses Georgia, Ohio, and Texas, He loses PA by ten points. It’s so big that even he realizes he can’t BS his way to a win.
He still tries for a few days. But once it becomes clear that Biden is getting the win, he heads down to Mar-A-Lago for the weekend…and doesn’t come back. He doesn’t resign, he doesn’t fire anyone, he doesn’t transfer power. He just quits.
He still golfs and maybe talks some shit on Twitter, but he just refuses to take part in any Presidential duties. He won’t talk to his staff, won’t sign anything, won’t command the military. “Tell them to call Biden,” he says, not caring that he won’t take office for two months.
What would happen? They can’t drag him to the Oval or the Situation Room. Would they impeach him and actually remove him this time? Could the Cabinet invoke the 25th if he’s not incapacitated but just being a massive prick?
I’m pretty sure willful neglection of duties would get him sectioned 25.
His cabinet would probably be okay with this at that point (they still have careers to worry about). And I’m sure his security detail would love to drag Trump to the WH if such is needed to invoke the 25th.
It would be an improvement. Really, what would the difference be? Trump would just not be around to screw everything up. Th The remaining staff could focus on a transition, and start talking to Biden’s staff about January 20. If Jared or Ivanka tried to give any orders, they could be simply ignored, or told to STFU and get out of the way.
Sounds like an ideal situation for everyone, really.
I suppose if Trump really wanted to give America a “fuck you” gesture on his way out, he’d dismiss his entire cabinet and indeed every political appointment he could, then flounce, basically decapitating the executive branch on his way out. If there is no cabinet at all, can Pence invoke the 25th all by himself?
Did Pelosi actually follow through on that? I thought it was just an amusing stunt to irritate Trump, but if there’s an actual committee in place, I’m in favour of it in principle, but I can see how it could be abused in future, if a Republican congress uses it to harass a Democrat president, constantly ordering him to jump through various hoops to demonstrate “fitness”, repeatedly issuing subpoenas for the president’s staff, basically trying to run Benghazi-type hearings over and over in hopes something will stick either legally or in the minds of voters.
If Trump loses and remains true to form, he will scream louder than Howard Dean. His live, on-air rant will be parodied the way Downfall’s famous scene was. I think we’ll see him get in his golden airplane and fly somewhere for vacation, maybe to one of his golf courses in Scotland (if he doesn’t flee to Russia!).
I don’t know what medical intervention may be required if someone has a truly epic non-stop rant.
As for the hypothetical, there would be a weak attempt to get him to meet Biden for the traditional “Old Prez Meets New Prez”. I’m sure Trump didn’t like meeting Obama for that meeting, but at least that time he could wave his victory in Obama’s face. Not this time. Maybe Trump won’t show, or will make Biden wait as a last minute power play.
Trump doesn’t actually need to be at the White House to do much, beyond sign bills. He can launch nuclear weapons from away (frightening thought!) so he isn’t needed even for that.
President Donald Trump signed a temporary, stop-gap funding measure into law in the early hours of Thursday morning, which avoids a government shutdown and keeps agencies running through Dec. 11.
I suppose they could Article 25 him and get Pence to do it.
Congress can actually do a lot without a President. Article I, Section 7, Clauses 2 and 3 of the Constitution state that if Congress passes a law, the President has ten days to sign or veto it. If he does neither, the bill automatically becomes law. Appropriations, declarations of war, ratification of Supreme Court justices, etc., don’t need the President to do anything.
Congress can’t order a nuclear strike, of course, but I suppose if Dear Leader Kim decided to nuke Guam or Hawaii, the Defense Department would simply declare the President to be “out of contact” and go with Contingency Plan A.
You’re right, of course – it was only crucial that Trump sign the last funding resolution because they’d left it to the last minute and waiting even 10 days would have been a problem.
I suspect the back of my head was thinking ‘pocket veto’ but that only happens if Congress goes out of session.
Yeah, other than the need to sign the next continuing resolution, the rest of the government can just carry on in “marking time” mode doing whatever the ageny heads are empowered to do by themselves w/o having to clear it with POTUS.
No, it would not be operational now anyway, it has to be actually enacted to be empowered under 25A, meaning Senate would have to pass and POTUS sign it, and as she proposed it it would come into effect in the next term.
The commission still would need the Veep to sign off on it:
It’s the Veep and either a majority of Cabinet or of “such other body”.
So the Congress by itself can’t invoke the provision, via “such other body” as it creates. Still needs the Veep, and presumably a Democratic Veep won’t take action against a Democratic Prez, and same for Republican Veep and Prez.
Yes, but the result may be less important than the harassment. A hostile congress could replace the president and just get the vice-president… big deal. But if they can constantly smear the president under the guise of “we’re just making sure of his fitness, that’s important for the country, don’t-cha-know, don’t you want to make sure the president is fit for office, why do you hate America?”, that might help them more. It could end up like the “Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade” from Catch-22 - it’s not about loyalty at all, but about power.
But the point wouldn’t be to remove the prez, just to embarrass the prez. As I understood the Benghazi-investigation circus, it was never the point to actually find some definable wrongdoing that could be used to impeach then Secretary-of-State Clinton, because even if it got that far, the Democrats in the Senate wouldn’t go for it anyway. Impeachment is actually a losing endgame, because once you play that card, the process has to end with a Clinton acquittal. Rather, by dragging the process out as long as possible, it cements in the minds of at least some of the American public that there must be something there, smoke and fire and whatnot, all to try to sabotage Clinton’s election prospects when she made her predicted presidential run. In a hypothetical case for a first-term president of a party different than the congressional majority, just perpetually “investigate” his fitness, not in hopes of having the Veep replace him, but to reduce the chance of the Prez (and Veep) winning re-election.
Yeah, this. After about a week of waiting (to see if he’s really staying quiet), we all breathe a sigh of relief, and let the career bureaucrats run the day-to-day operations of the government for a couple of months.
Maybe take the opportunity to fumigate the White House while he’s gone.