It’s the day after the election in some presidential election year, and the people have just decided that the incumbent does not deserve a second term. Reacting like an angry five-year-old, the president decides to take his or her ball and go home. Literally.
If after a few days it becomes obvious that the president has no intention to return to the White House, and more importantly, he or she has no intention to govern for the remainder of his or her term, who makes the decisions if they refuse to?
Hopefully their abandonment of their term would come during a time of peace and stability, but what if there’s say, a war or a depression or a pandemic on-going on that can’t be left without someone making hard decisions about for three months?
Or what if instead of leaving the White House, they lock themselves in their bedroom or office and just refuse to meet with anyone?
If the president doesn’t want to do his duties, the 25th amendment becomes much easier. The only real uphill part of that is if the president challenges it.
So, then VP takes over for the remainder of the lame duck period. In any case, most day to day stuff would be handled by cabinet members and other functionaries.
The GQ response is that the VP steps up.
In the real world, where the President is likely to refuse to hand the keys to the kingdom over and the VP might just back him up on that decision…we are pretty much screwed until the both of them are officially removed from power.
I apologize if the OP wasn’t clear enough, but this is exactly what I mean. We have fairly clear rules for an orderly transfer of power, but I suspect not toddler-like tantrums that result in the refusal to do anything, even officially give up the presidency.
The Vice President and majority of the cabinet declare that they consider the president to be unable to perform his job, sign a letter to that effect and deliver it to the Senate. The VP then takes over as president. The President would have to write a letter to Congress stating that he wants to have the office back, but doing so would break your hypothetical so he’s just gone at this point. If he does break with the hypothetical, the VP still acts as president until congress convenes to vote on whether the VP or president should be in charge, and they have up to 21 days to do so.
Also, Congress can opt to impeach the president and remove him from office if 2/3 of them are willing to do so. If the President is really doing nothing (which hinders congress’s ability to act) and refusing to do anything during a crisis, it’s pretty likely that they’d be willing to impeach and convict.
If DJT truly did nothing that would be a huge improvement over the random vandalism of the USA and all her works that he’s practiced the last 3+ years.
Sadly DJT can’t stop running his mouth / twitter. So he’ll keep doing damage via that method even if he never attends a meeting, signs a paper, or gives an instruction at work.
In the case of the current president, he watches a lot of Fox News. But I wish everyone would stop using his initials. Those are also my initials and I don’t appreciate sharing them with him.
Anyway, the OP does not mention the current president, just a hypothetical one. So perhaps we should stop talking about the current one.
Echo, echo… The man is an abomination to humanity. The less he does the better it is for all, even his supporters - though, I get that they fail to see this.
After Clinton won in 92 Bush sent 25k US troops to Somalia in December to help out with peacekeeping. I’m guessing he told Clinton before he made the move public. The mission ended in May of 93. That was a pretty major thing to do as a lame duck president.
We’ve had periods where the president is largely incapable of leading and someone else (wife, VP) took over behind the scenes without invoking the 25th Amendment. I’d assume that if the president refused to come into work any more, the people with questions would go to the VP to get them answered without making a crisis case out of it.
Presuming anything resembling the current administration, the VP and the republicans would refuse to invoke the 25th or do anything else to get Trump out of power; his tantrum could not be assumed to be a permanent thing and if it were an abrogation of the presidential duties to sit around and do nothing then Trump would have been ousted years ago.
Obviously if he literally were doing nothing, no tweeting, disappearing entirely from the public sphere, that would be a significant boon to the country. But, would there be any actual problems arising from it? Is there anything the president has to do? Sign bills into law, whatever?
I don’t think the Republicans would be happy to have the President refusing to appoint the people they want and refusing to sign the legislation they’ve passed. While unsigned legislation usually will become law without an active veto, it’s possible for the Democrats to adjourn congress and turn ‘president did nothing’ into a pocket veto. If his tantrum lasted three months, that’s the same as permanent as he would be out of office at the end of it.
Trump being a general disgrace but appointing people, issuing executive orders, and signing legislation that Republicans want is completely different than Trump being a general disgrace and not appointing people, not issuing any executive orders, and not signing any legislation at all.
I mean, maybe? My question was partly inspired by real life: I had a director just kinda decide that he didn’t want to be the director anymore, and Office Space-style just stopped showing up after a vacation.
It took a few weeks before people across all three locations realized that he wasn’t spending time in his other offices (he had an office in each location and split his time among them) or traveling for business/on a more extended vacation.
What followed, was a few more weeks of increasing chaos because important decisions eventually did need to be made and there was no succession plan to follow because not only hadn’t he bothered to pass his work off to anyone, the associate director who normally would’ve been dubbed acting director had left a few weeks earlier and the position hadn’t yet been filled. Eventually the board made someone acting director and acting associate director.
and fifth character. Can’t just give you a Thumbs up. Post too short.