Casey joins Schumer, Pelosi in urging Cabinet to oust Trump over siege on Capitol

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and several House Democrats from Pennsylvania, including Rep. Mike Doyle of Forest Hills, joined a growing chorus including Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling on President Trump’s Cabinet to remove him from office following Wednesday’s violent assault on the Capitol by the president’s supporters.

“President Trump is a threat to our domestic and national security,” Casey, D-Scranton, said Thursday in a statement. “It is self-evident that the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

If the Cabinet doesn’t take action, Schumer and Pelosi said, Congress should be prepared to move forward with impeachment.

“The president of the United States incited an armed insurrection against America,” Pelosi said, adding Trump could do further harm to the country. “Any day can be a horror show for America.”

Schumer similarly described the attack on the Capitol as “an insurrection against the United States, incited by the president.”

“This president should not hold office one day longer,” Schumer said.

More than 100 Democrats and some Republicans in Congress say they want Trump removed before his term ends on Jan. 20 with Democratic President-elect Joe Biden’s oath of office. Schumer said Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet should invoke the 25th Amendment to do so.

Doyle, the longest-tenured member of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation, agreed the 25th Amendment should be used to prevent Trump “from causing more damage to the United States between now and Inauguration Day.

“I think a lot of us woke up this morning and said there’s got to be a price to pay for what he did … to say, well, Trump’s leaving pretty soon, there has to be some accountability,” Doyle told the Tribune-­Review.

Doyle said if Pence and the Cabinet don’t invoke the 25th Amendement and “House Speaker Pelosi calls us back to impeach the president, I will vote to impeach him.”

When asked if he was concerned about further escalating tensions with Trump’s supporters, Doyle said, “I believe he’s lost a huge chunk of that 74 million (that voted for him) just by his actions since the day after the election. If the same people could vote again, that number would be diminished greatly.”

Among other members of Pennsylvania’s delegation who expressed support for using the 25th Amendment to unseat Trump: Reps. Madeleine Dean, D-Montgomery County; Dwight Evans, D-Philadelphia; Chrissy Houlahan, D-Chester County; and Mary Gay Scanlon, a Delaware County Democrat who serves as vice chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Trump is unfit to serve.

Whether it’s the 25th amendment or we have to impeach him for a *second* time.

Trump must go. https://t.co/9fHhkx4ICb

— Congresswoman Madeleine Dean (@RepDean) January 7, 2021

Yesterday’s attack on our Capitol was a form of insurrection instigated by a sitting president.

If Vice President Pence does not immediately invoke the 25th Amendment, Congress must impeach and remove this president.

— Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon (@RepMGS) January 7, 2021

President Trump is a threat to our domestic and national security. It is self-evident that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.

— Senator Bob Casey (@SenBobCasey) January 7, 2021

What could happen next

The 25th Amendment allows for the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare the president unfit for office. The vice president then becomes acting president.

It is not the first time detractors have sought Trump’s ouster through invocation of the amendment. Early in his term, Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California introduced a resolution urging Trump to seek a medical and psychiatric evaluation to determine his fitness for office, with an eye on the law governing presidential succession.

The proposal went nowhere.

Many Democrats took up the cause again Wednesday after a pro-Trump mob, egged on by the president, briefly invaded the Capitol and disrupted certification of Joe Biden’s November election. An unlikely ally, the National Association of Manufacturers, echoed the call for Trump’s ouster less than two weeks before his term ends, urging Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment as a way to “preserve democracy.”

“This is not law and order. This is chaos. It is mob rule. It is dangerous. This is sedition and should be treated as such,” the association’s president, Jay Timmons, said in a statement.

Republican Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger said Trump “must now relinquish control of the executive branch voluntarily or involuntarily.”

Under the amendment, which addresses the issue of presidential disability as well as succession, the vice president and a majority of the president’s Cabinet may declare the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” by notifying the leaders of the House and Senate. At that point, the vice president assumes the duties of the president.

But it’s not that simple: Trump would have to go along, a scenario that seems implausible, to say the least.

If the vice president and Cabinet declared the president incapacitated, he could reclaim his powers by writing to legislative leaders and declaring his ability to do the job. If the vice president and Cabinet members object, the matter then gets kicked over to Congress, which has 21 days to act. It would require a two-thirds vote in both chambers to strip the president of his powers, once and for all.

Trump’s term is set to expire at noon Jan. 20.

The Constitution makes it clear the vice president is next in line to the president. But there was some question about how exactly that worked.

In 1955, after a heart attack and other maladies, President Dwight Eisenhower worried about the transfer of power if he were temporarily incapacitated, especially given hair-trigger relations with the Soviet Union. He worked out an informal arrangement with his vice president, Richard Nixon, in case he needed to temporarily cede power

After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Congress passed the 25th Amendment in July 1965. It was ratified in February 1967.

The amendment also lays out how to replace a vice president. The first use of the amendment occurred in 1973 when President Nixon chose Rep. Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to fill the vacancy after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in October 1973. Ford, in turn, became president when Nixon quit in August 1974. Ford then chose former New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president.

In 1987, aides to President Ronald Reagan weighed the possibility of invoking the amendment when concerns grew about his listless and detached behavior in his second term. The prospect was soon dismissed, however, when chief of staff Howard Baker deemed Reagan fit to serve.

Separately, on three occasions Reagan and President George W. Bush voluntarily transferred power to their vice presidents when they had surgery under general anesthesia. Each reclaimed the powers of the presidency with little notice or disruption to government operations.

In another move to hold Trump to account, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota said Wednesday she was drawing up new articles of presidential impeachment.

“We can’t allow him to remain in office,” she wrote on Twitter, “it’s a matter of preserving our Republic and we need to fulfill our oath.”

Trump was impeached by the Democratic-led House of Representatives in December 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, stemming from efforts to pressure the head of Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden ahead of the 2020 campaign. The president was acquitted a month later by the GOP-run Senate.

Tribune-Review staff writers Natasha Lindstrom and Paul Guggenheimer contributed.