The 25th Amendment Is Not A Policy Override, No Matter What Aron Solomon Or The Hill Says

Consider a thought experiment. Imagine that a foreign national, a man who cannot vote in American elections and who holds no American citizenship, publishes an essay in a prominent Washington outlet calling on the cabinet of the sitting president of the United States to remove him from office. Imagine further that the basis for this extraordinary demand is not that the president has suffered a stroke, not that he has lapsed into a coma, not that he cannot recognize his own advisors or sign his own name, but that the foreign national disagrees with the president’s foreign policy. Now stop imagining, because this is exactly what happened when Aron Solomon, a Canadian legal commentator who has lived and worked in Toronto for years, published an op-ed in The Hill urging President Trump’s cabinet to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment over the administration’s approach to Iran.

The audacity is breathtaking, but the constitutional illiteracy is worse. Solomon’s argument, stripped of its rhetorical dressing, amounts to a simple claim: because he believes the president’s Iran strategy lacks coherence, the vice president and a majority of the cabinet should declare the president unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. That is not what the 25th Amendment says. It is not what it means. It is not what its framers intended. And publishing such a call in a major American outlet is not brave commentary. It is a blueprint for a soft coup dressed in constitutional language.

To understand why Solomon’s argument fails so completely, one must first understand what the 25th Amendment actually does. The amendment was ratified in 1967, after decades of constitutional uncertainty about presidential succession and disability. The impetus was practical and bipartisan. When Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919, no constitutional mechanism existed to transfer power to the vice president, and the country essentially limped along with an incapacitated executive hidden from public view by his wife and physician. When Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955 and a stroke in 1957, the same ambiguity persisted. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 finally galvanized Congress to act, not because Kennedy’s death created a disability problem but because it reminded legislators how easily one could arise. Had Kennedy survived but been left in a vegetative state, the nation would have faced a constitutional crisis with no established procedure for resolution.

The 25th Amendment addresses this problem in 4 sections. Section 1 clarifies that the vice president becomes president, not merely acting president, if the president dies, resigns, or is removed by impeachment. Section 2 provides a mechanism for filling a vacancy in the vice presidency, a provision used twice in the 1970s when Spiro Agnew resigned and then when Richard Nixon resigned. Section 3 allows the president to voluntarily transfer power temporarily, as several presidents have done before undergoing medical procedures requiring anesthesia. Section 4 is the provision Solomon invokes, and it is also the only section that has never been used. Not once in nearly 60 years.

Section 4 provides that when the vice president and a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments transmit a written declaration to the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate stating that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” the vice president immediately assumes those powers and duties as acting president. The president may then transmit his own written declaration asserting that no inability exists, at which point his powers and duties are restored, unless the vice president and cabinet majority reaffirm their declaration within four days. If they do, Congress must assemble within 48 hours and decide the matter within 21 days. To keep the vice president acting as president, 2/3 of both the House and the Senate must vote to sustain the finding of inability. That is a higher threshold than impeachment and conviction, which requires only a simple House majority to impeach and 2/3 of the Senate to convict.

The operative word in this entire structure is “unable.” Not “unwise.” Not “reckless.” Not “insufficiently coherent in the estimation of a Canadian marketing consultant.” Unable. The text does not say “abuses,” “endangers,” or “misgoverns.” It says unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. That language was chosen deliberately. The Congressional Research Service, in its official analysis of the amendment’s legislative history, explains that the central congressional fights during the drafting process centered on Section 4, precisely because legislators recognized that it could be misused as an internal political weapon. The framers of the amendment built multiple accountability mechanisms into the provision to prevent displacement of an elected president for political purposes. They required initiation by the vice president plus close executive officials, not outside commentators or opposition party members. They required rapid congressional involvement in any dispute. They imposed a 2/3 vote in both chambers, a threshold explicitly described during the debates as higher than impeachment, to sustain inability over the president’s objection.

That architecture supports a straightforward inference. Even if “inability” is not exhaustively defined in the constitutional text, the designers expected inability determinations to be made in good faith as incapacity judgments, not as a surrogate for policy defeat in the legislature or at the ballot box. The Congressional Research Service characterizes Section 4 as addressing “episodes of presidential inability” and highlights the anti-abuse checks intended to protect governmental stability against political displacement. In modern constitutional commentary, this limiting principle appears as a sharp distinction: the 25th Amendment is not a remedy for misconduct, and it is certainly not a remedy for policy disagreement. Impeachment is the canonical constitutional remedy for misconduct. Elections are the canonical constitutional remedy for policy disagreement. Section 4 exists for something else entirely, for the terrifying scenario in which the president simply cannot function.

Solomon does not engage with any of this. His argument, as published in The Hill, collapses “inability” into “I disagree with the policy,” a move that would transform the American presidency from a constitutionally independent executive into something resembling a parliamentary prime minister who serves at the pleasure of his cabinet. The U.S. Constitution does not create a parliamentary system. It does not create a confidence mechanism by which the cabinet may remove the president when they lose faith in his direction. The president serves a fixed term. He can be removed before that term expires only through the specific constitutional pathways designed for specific constitutional problems: impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors, the 25th Amendment for genuine incapacity. Blurring those distinctions does not strengthen the constitutional order. It demolishes it.

This is where the fact of Solomon’s Canadian citizenship becomes more than an amusing biographical detail. It becomes substantively relevant. Solomon is a citizen of a parliamentary democracy in which the prime minister can indeed be removed by a vote of no confidence. In Canada, the governor general can dissolve Parliament and call new elections, and a prime minister who loses the confidence of the House of Commons is expected to resign. That is how the Canadian system works, and it works tolerably well for Canadians. But it is not how the American system works, and importing parliamentary instincts into constitutional analysis of the 25th Amendment produces exactly the kind of confusion Solomon’s essay embodies. A Canadian legal analyst, however credentialed, is perhaps not the ideal person to lecture the American cabinet on when to execute what would amount to the most dramatic internal executive action in the history of the republic. He cannot vote in American elections. He does not live under the American constitutional order. He would bear none of the consequences of the constitutional crisis he is cheerfully advocating from the safety of a foreign country.

The Hill‘s editorial decision to publish this piece is itself an indictment of the outlet’s judgment. The Hill is not a fringe blog. It is a Washington institution read by staffers, lobbyists, and legislators. Publishing a call for what amounts to a cabinet coup, authored by a foreign national, on the basis of a policy disagreement, lends the imprimatur of mainstream respectability to an idea that is constitutionally illiterate and politically dangerous. It is the kind of editorial choice that validates the conservative critique of legacy media as fundamentally unserious about constitutional norms when those norms protect a Republican president.

This is, of course, a pattern. The drive-by media, as the late Rush Limbaugh memorably named the Washington press corps, has discovered the 25th Amendment the way a child discovers a new toy. Every time a Republican president says something that offends the editorial sensibilities of the coastal press, calls to invoke the 25th Amendment spike like a fever. It happened after January 6, 2021. It happened during Trump’s first term whenever he posted something colorful on social media. It is happening now over the Iran conflict. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut spent Easter Sunday posting on 𝕏 about how he would be calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th Amendment if he were in Trump’s Cabinet. Representative Ilhan Omar demanded invocation, impeachment, and removal in a single breathless post. Senator Bernie Sanders called the president’s statements “ravings.” None of these figures engaged seriously with the constitutional text. None of them explained how a policy disagreement, even a heated one, satisfies the textual requirement of inability to discharge powers and duties. They simply grabbed the most dramatic constitutional mechanism they could think of and waved it around for the cameras.

The prediction market has treated these calls with the seriousness they deserve, which is to say, not much. The probability of actual 25th Amendment removal has risen modestly, from roughly 12% to 14%, which is another way of saying that people putting real money on the line assign an 86% probability that this is noise. And noise is exactly what it is. Vice President Vance is not going to declare President Trump unable to serve. The cabinet, composed of officials chosen by and loyal to the president, is not going to transmit a declaration of inability to Congress. Even if they did, 2/3 of both the House and the Senate would have to sustain that declaration over the president’s objection, a mathematical impossibility in a Congress where Republicans hold significant support for the president’s agenda.

But the impossibility of the outcome does not excuse the irresponsibility of the advocacy. Calling for a 25th Amendment removal on policy grounds is not a harmless act of political theater. It degrades the constitutional provision itself. If the 25th Amendment becomes associated in the public mind with partisan overreach and policy disagreements, then the one time it might actually be needed, when a president is genuinely incapacitated and the nation needs a smooth transfer of authority, the provision will carry the taint of all the frivolous invocations that preceded it. The boy who cried wolf eventually faces a real wolf, and nobody comes running. Solomon and his media enablers at The Hill are the boys crying wolf, and the wolf they are inviting is a future in which no American trusts the constitutional mechanisms designed to protect the continuity of government.

There is also the matter of accountability. Solomon treats the 25th Amendment as though invoking it were a cost-free act of constitutional hygiene. It is not. If a vice president and cabinet invoked Section 4 for transparently political reasons, the consequences would be severe and far-reaching. The president, once restored to power, and he would almost certainly be restored given the 2/3 threshold, could remove every cabinet member who signed the declaration. Congressional committees could investigate whether the declaration was made in bad faith. Cabinet officers are civil officers of the United States subject to impeachment. In theory, if contemporaneous communications revealed that the real motive was policy opposition rather than genuine concern about incapacity, criminal theories involving knowingly false representations to federal authorities could even be explored, though the evidentiary bar would be extraordinarily high. The point is that the framers of the 25th Amendment did not design Section 4 to be easy or costless. They designed it to be hard, because it is not supposed to be used as a routine political remedy. The supermajority requirement, the rapid counter-declaration process, the compressed congressional timeline, all of these features exist precisely to prevent the kind of casual invocation that Solomon recommends.

Consider the contrast between two scenarios. In the first, a president suffers a sudden stroke and cannot communicate or process information. Physicians document the incapacity. The vice president and cabinet invoke Section 4 to ensure continuity of government. Weeks later, the president recovers, transmits a declaration that no inability exists, and resumes his duties. This is the scenario the 25th Amendment was designed for, and it would be broadly accepted as legitimate across party lines. In the second scenario, a president pursues a foreign policy that his critics consider reckless. The vice president and cabinet invoke Section 4, claiming the president’s judgment is “unhinged.” The president immediately counters that no inability exists. Congress divides along partisan lines. The 2/3 threshold fails. The president returns to full power and removes the signatories. The political system suffers a lasting legitimacy shock because the record reveals a policy veto, not an incapacity determination. This second scenario is what Solomon is advocating, whether he understands it or not.

The deeper irony is that Solomon’s argument actually undermines the very constitutional safeguards he claims to champion. If you believe, as Solomon apparently does, that presidential foreign policy decisions can be so dangerous that they justify emergency removal, then the proper constitutional response is impeachment. Article 2 provides that the president may be removed for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. If members of Congress genuinely believe the president has committed war crimes or violated the law, impeachment is the mechanism the Constitution provides. It requires a simple majority in the House to impeach and 2/3 of the Senate to convict, and it results in actual removal from office, not the temporary and unstable transfer of “powers and duties” that Section 4 creates. The fact that Solomon reaches for the 25th Amendment rather than impeachment reveals the weakness of his own position. He does not actually have a legal case for high crimes and misdemeanors. He has a policy disagreement. And the Constitution does not allow you to remove a president because a Canadian blogger thinks his Iran strategy is incoherent.

The Hill owes its readers an explanation. Not for publishing controversial opinions, which is the purpose of an opinion section, but for publishing constitutionally reckless advocacy authored by a foreign national with no stake in the American constitutional order. American democracy is resilient, but it is not indestructible, and the casual weaponization of constitutional mechanisms designed for genuine emergencies is one of the surest ways to weaken it. Solomon should stick to commenting on Canadian law, where his citizenship gives him standing and his parliamentary instincts make sense. The Hill should exercise the editorial judgment that its position in Washington demands. And the rest of us should recognize calls to invoke the 25th Amendment over policy disagreements for what they are: not constitutional analysis, but political theater performed by people who either do not understand the Constitution or do not care what it says.

READ NEXT: Silicon Valley’s Subtle Influence Permanently Reshapes Society