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Who Wrote the 25th Amendment?
It turns out he’s still alive, and still teaching at Fordham Law. We had some questions about an amendment that wasn’t written to meet a moment like this.
by David Dayen and Maureen TkacikApril 7, 2026
The president of the United States threatened an entire civilization of people on Tuesday, triggering everyone from Ilhan Omar and Maxwell Frost to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones to demand that someone, anyone invoke the 25th Amendment to get Donald Trump out of spitting distance of the nuclear football.
When people say this, they’re really talking about Section 4 of the 25th Amendment. Passed in 1967, the first three sections were primarily focused on avoiding a rehash of the 14 months post–Kennedy assassination, during which LBJ chain-smoked, pulled all-nighters, drunk-drove his own fleet of cars—including an amphibious Ford he enjoyed charging into the lake as a “prank” to visitors—while only stopping to ask a Secret Service agent to refill his scotch and soda, and underwent a series of minor surgeries, all in the absence of a vice president or any mechanism for appointing one.
More from David Dayen | Maureen Tkacik
A close read of the text of Section 4, which covers transferring the functions of a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” to the vice president, reveals that it was not exactly purpose-built for a moment when the president is unpopular, corrupt, crazy, or possibly inclined to perpetrate nuclear holocaust out of rage over his depiction in an AI Lego video disseminated by a foreign adversary. It’s rather designed primarily for the president being in a coma and unable to give consent to removal. But if he has enough brain activity left to resist removal, that would lead to a situation where a larger percentage of Congress would be needed to replace the president than would be needed under the never-been-invoked option of removal by impeachment.
For most of the Constitution, at this point you would have to blame 18th-century drafters for such a mind-bendingly complex, legalistic, and loophole-ridden text, those Founders in powdered wigs who could never conceive of a modern system of governance, and the mischiefs of faction. But again, the 25th Amendment was written not even 60 years ago. And its author is still alive, and still on the faculty at Fordham University Law School.
If the goal of Section 4 of the 25th Amendment was to be flexible, the difficulties with using it in the modern day are legion.
His name is John D. Feerick, he turns 90 in July, and when we first tried to contact him on the day of perhaps the maximum interest in the constitutional amendment he penned, he was teaching a class—a Rule of Law seminar on (inter alia) the 25th Amendment, naturally. When he returned the Prospect’s call, he was not inclined to weigh in on the viability of his handiwork for deposing a president both Candace Owens and Rep. Seth Moulton have deemed “insane.”
“I’ve had questions like this going back to Reagan’s time, but I try to stay away from getting involved in questions about trying to apply the 25th Amendment to any situation,” he said. “I’m an independent voter, and I try to look at these matters not through the lens of ideology, but out of love for America and what is consistent with the Constitution.”
Feerick joined Fordham in 1982 after a career as an employment attorney at Skadden, Arps. After becoming partner, he rose through the American Bar Association, and served on its Conference on Presidential Inability and Vice-Presidential Vacancy. This was conceived right after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which raised concerns that if his injuries were not fatal but rendered him incapacitated, there was no way to remove him from office, nor was there any way for Lyndon Johnson to choose a vice president once ascending to the presidency. But Feerick said congressional hand-wringing over the topic first surfaced during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who suffered a heart attack while in office in 1955 and a stroke in 1957, the seriousness of which did not emerge until after he left office. On November 17, 1963, The New York Times published an excerpt of a letter Feerick had written criticizing Congress for its failure “to eliminate the possibility of a gap in the executive because of confusion existing over the meaning of the succession provision of the Constitution.” Who, he wondered, “has the right to determine the commencement and termination of an inability?”
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Five days after the letter was published, the question took on terrifying new urgency, and Sen. Birch Bayh (D-IN) tapped Feerick to write an amendment taking care of such line-of-succession emergencies, which has since become a rallying cry to remove someone deemed mentally and spiritually, if not physically, incapacitated. The law professor wrote a whole book about it in 1976. What amazes him to this day is that the question was floated at the Constitutional Convention back in 1787, when Delaware delegate John Dickinson asked “what is the extent of the term ‘disability’ and who is to be the judge of it?” But scouring the records for any sign of an answer from his contemporaries, Feerick only found … crickets. “Nobody answered him!”
Nearly 180 years later, the then-29-year-old legal scholar hesitated to weigh in too explicitly about where the threshold should be. Section 4 is intentionally devoid of any specific thresholds or standards for judging the “inability” of the president to function, nor did the amendment require evidence of that inability. “No set of definitions could possibly deal with every contingency,” Feerick wrote in a 1995 Wake Forest Law Review article, and he told Congress during debate on the amendment that inability “is more than a medical question.” Feerick has even said, agreeing with the assessment of Rep. Richard Poff (R-VA), that his solution is available “when the President … is unable or unwilling to make any rational decision, including particularly the decision to stand aside.”
But if the goal of Section 4 was to be flexible, the difficulties with using it in the modern day to cashier a president who has even minimal capabilities are legion.
The text of Section 4 begins rather simply, stating that the vice president and a majority of the “principal officers of the executive departments” can tell the House and Senate that the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” instantly granting the vice president temporary powers of the office as acting president. This would be a natural thing to consider if the president were in a car wreck and on a medical gurney, but not if he’s just contemplating war crimes. Wresting control through this provision has the look of a palace coup, and unless you have a very ambitious vice president (check) who can convince the cabinet to take his side (very much NOT check), it’s hard to see it happening.
But wait! There’s a side provision to get around the problem of a loyalist cabinet. Congress can create some “other body” to independently determine the fitness of the president under the amendment. If it does so, that body would replace the role of the vice president and the cabinet in determining the inability of the president. But that independent body would have to be created “by law,” and the way you create laws in this country is that they are signed by the president. Three months after the first Trump inauguration, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) introduced a bill that would have created an “independent commission on presidential capacity” featuring at least two physicians, two psychiatrists, and two retired statesmen; unsurprisingly, it never went anywhere under either Joe Biden or the Orange One, whom then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously threatened to invoke Feerick’s handiwork to depose. I would not expect a president who didn’t want to be removed from office to sign into law the creation of a panel to assess whether they should be removed from office.
Sure, Congress can override the expected veto, but that would require a two-thirds vote from the House and Senate. In an impeachment scenario, only a bare majority is needed in the House, with a two-thirds vote needed in the Senate to convict and remove from office after a trial. So just to put Congress in position of deciding on the abilities of the president would require a higher bar than impeachment.
That’s also true of the entire process, because the president gets a veto of sorts over his removal for incapacitation. Under the amendment, if the president sends a letter to the House and the Senate saying that he is in fact able to carry out the duties of the office, he instantly becomes president again. The vice president and the cabinet would then have four days to send their own letter, effectively saying no, the president is not able. At that point, the action shifts to Congress, which must vote to settle the dispute between the president and his executive branch. And that vote would take, once again, two-thirds majorities in both houses to affirm that the president is unable to perform, and revert control back to the vice president. Once again, this is a higher bar than impeachment.
We should add that in all of these scenarios, as long as the president doesn’t step down, he would still be the president, just stripped temporarily of the powers and duties of the office. What that means is anybody’s guess.
The guy who wrote this Rube Goldberg machine is still living, and bearing witness to lawmakers screaming for his amendment to be invoked when it plainly cannot serve the purpose they want. He was simply trying to solve a different problem, and no amount of longing for a deus ex machina to end a living nightmare can change that. Congress has the impeachment power to help themselves, and no real work-around for it, period.
President Trump hands “DoorDash Grandma” — 
canisgallicus 