How Nancy Pelosi can make the 25th Amendment happen

| 3:48 pm EDT October 8, 2020
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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced today that she’ll be holding some kind of meeting tomorrow about the 25th Amendment. Of course she doesn’t have the authority to invoke the 25th Amendment against Donald Trump; only Mike Pence does. But she may actually be able to pull it off anyway.

Mike Pence knows that he and Donald Trump are highly likely to lose the election. That means Pence is surely looking to the future. He doesn’t have one; if Trump and Pence lose in 2020, then Pence has absolutely zero chance of becoming president in 2024. But Pence may not know that, considering how many pundits keep trying to hype the suspense by pretending that Pence does have some 2024 prospects.

If Pence thinks he has a future, he’s going to handle these next several weeks in whatever manner the Republican leadership tells him to. After all, once Trump is gone, Pence’s future would rest in the hands of any Republican leaders in the House and Senate who survive the 2020 blue wave.

So if Pelosi has any hope of getting Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment, she’d have to start by getting certain Republicans in the House and Senate to understand that their own chances of surviving in office are dependent on doing their part in getting rid of Donald Trump. Pelosi would seek to generate overwhelming public pressure on the GOP in this regard. If there’s one thing the Republicans in Congress care about more than corruptly protecting Trump, it’s about selfishly protecting their own seats.

That’s not to say that his strategy would have a particularly strong chance of working. But considering there’s a raging, dying, drug addled lunatic in the Oval Office right now, it would be worth trying. And even if it doesn’t work, the Republicans’ refusal to go along with the 25th Amendment could serve to cost them even more seats next month. Of course Pelosi is smarter than I am, so we’ll see what she truly has up her sleeve.