With the escalation of the war in Iran comes an escalation in talk about whether and how President Trump can be removed from office. But neither impeachment nor invocation of the 25th Amendment is likely to succeed. Members of Congress should stop wasting time on the potential use of these two means of removing the president and instead devote more time to considering the War Powers Resolution Act, which requires Congress to either stop the war Trump started. or make it its own.
The Constitution provides two means by which the President can be removed from office against his will. Both have been considered during President Trump’s first term; neither worked then, nor are they likely to work now.
The first means is by impeachment, which requires a majority vote in the House of Representatives to charge the president with offenses and a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate to remove him from office. President Trump was, of course, twice impeached by the House—once in 2019 and again in 2021. However, in each case, most Republican senators voted to retain him in office, thereby denying the pro-impeachment forces the votes necessary to remove him from office or bar him from holding future federal office.
Should the Democrats, as expected, win a House majority in the upcoming midterms, it is all but certain they will impeach Trump a third time, but, once again, there will probably be enough Republican senators to block his removal. This assumes, of course, that he continues to retain the loyalty of his MAGA base. If his popularity levels fall to Nixonian levels (23% approval rating in the summer of 1974), Republican senators may decide it’s safe to wash their hands of him and replace him with JD Vance. But that’s a big if. Impeachment will almost certainly proceed, but removal will probably fail.
The second constitutional means of removal is by invocation of the 25th Amendment, which says, in part, that should the Vice President and a majority of members of the President’s cabinet declare the President to be incapacitated, the President is therefore relieved of his authority and the Vice President becomes Acting President. But the President can reclaim his office by declaring the end of his incapacity, and if the Vice President refuses to yield, the President can nonetheless assume his powers with the vote of at least one-third of each chamber of Congress.
Whether this gambit could work in practice is questionable. After all, it requires that the President’s removal be effected by his Vice President and other officials he has appointed to office and who would presumably feel some degree of loyalty to him. To what degree would their loyalty to the President affect their decision on whether or not to support his removal? Nobody knows.
It should be noted that following the January 6, 2021, riots, there were numerous demands that Vice President Pence declare President Trump unfit for office and declare himself Acting President. Whether a majority of Trump’s cabinet would have supported Pence is unknown, but probably unlikely. With the exception of a few Cabinet officers who resigned to protest Trump’s conduct on 1/6, the Cabinet consisted of Trump loyalists. At any rate, Pence refused to invoke Amendment 25.
And demands that Vance invoke the 25th Amendment will likely produce a similar result. There seems to be no realistic possibility that he would actually do so or that the Trump loyalists in the cabinet—basically everyone—would support him if he did. And even if Trump were to be declared incapacitated by Vance and the Cabinet, Trump would probably have enough supporters in Congress to put him back in office. Invocation of the 25th Amendment will, like impeachment, probably fail.
Which brings us to the War Powers Resolution Act.
When I first criticized Trump for launching a war without congressional approval, despite the fact that the Constitution assigns to Congress the sole power to declare war, many of my Trump-supporting correspondents replied that Trump didn’t need congressional approval any more than did Presidents Clinton or Obama: The War Powers Act said so. And indeed, the Act does allow presidents to shoot first and explain later.
But what my correspondents didn’t say—no doubt an oversight—was that the Act nonetheless requires Congress to approve the President’s war if the President wants to continue it. In essence, the Act gives the President up to 60 days to wage war without congressional approval. If Congress refuses to extend the 60-day limit, the President must cease fighting and withdraw the armed forces (although Congress may give him an additional 30 days to do so to enhance the troops’ safety). And the Act gives Congress the power to end the war whenever it wants (although the constitutionality of this provision is questionable).
The current war was launched on February 28. The 60-day deadline for Congressional action is rapidly approaching. While impeachment and 25th Amendment invocation are discretionary, deciding on whether or not to continue Trump’s war seems mandatory. Should Congress decide to continue the war, it must, of course, supply the resources necessary for a satisfactory outcome. And it must be prepared to share, with Trump, the responsibility for whatever outcome is achieved. In short, therefore, Congress must stop spending time on considering whether or not to remove Trump from office, and instead determine whether to make Trump’s war its own as well.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville since 1987 and taught politics and government at Tarleton for 36 years, retiring in 2023. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990-2024). He was Mayor pro-tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Stephenville
Economic Development Authority since 2018, and as chair of the Erath County Appraisal District’s Appraisal Review Board since 2015. He is also a member of the Stephenville Rotary Club, the Board of Vestry of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and the Executive Committee of the Boy Scouts’ Pecan Valley District. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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