Dead and disabled presidents: The 25th Amendment

Last year, the sitting president of the United States, Joe Biden, delivered a debate performance so appalling his own party blocked him from running for reelection. The spectacle prompted a national conversation about the 25th Amendment, which deals with presidential disabilities and succession, with lawmakers urging Vice President Kamala Harris and the Cabinet to “do your duty to relieve [Biden] of his constitutional powers and duties.”

It never happened. But today, as we commemorate the 58th anniversary of the ratification of the 25th Amendment, it’s worth revisiting the long and tragic road that led to the antepenultimate amendment.

As recently documented, the Founding Fathers knew the new nation’s governing charter was imperfect. They fully intended for future generations to use Article V to rectify their mistakes. When the ninth president, William Henry Harrison, succumbed to pneumonia after a month in office, one of those oversights became painfully obvious: the Framers had failed to address several key issues regarding the presidential line of succession in the event of a president’s death. 

Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution states, “In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President …” This language sparked debate among contemporaries. Did “the Same” mean that the vice president should merely assume the “Powers and Duties” of the office, or did it signify a formal succession, making the vice president the new president?

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On April 4, 1841, Harrison’s cabinet, which included Secretary of State Daniel Webster and the Secretary of the Treasury Thomas Ewing, the adoptive father of future Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, issued a statement: “An all-wise Providence having suddenly removed from this life William Henry Harrison, late President of the United States, we have thought it our duty, in the recess of Congress and in the absence of the Vice-President from the seat of Government, to make this afflicting bereavement known to the country by this declaration under our hands” [italics added].

As if losing the president wasn’t enough, the nation now faced another uncertainty: where was the vice president? The answer to that question was fitting for the man who later championed secession and sided with the Confederates: John Tyler — “of Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” fame — was tending to his plantation in Virginia.

Despite Harrison’s illness, Tyler deemed the vice presidency insignificant and chose not to stay in Washington. However, when news of his boss’s death reached him, Tyler swiftly seized the opportunity to claim the presidency. He took the presidential oath despite the absence of explicit constitutional provisions designating his succession to the office. Opponents, including John Quincy Adams, accused Tyler of violating “both . . . the grammar and context of the Constitution” and dubbed him “His Accidency.”

President Tyler was wildly unpopular (at the time of his death, the New York Times slighted him as the “most unpopular public man that had ever held any office in the United States”). Nevertheless, he set a precedent — the “Tyler Precedent” — that stuck for generations. Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester A. Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry S. Truman all owe their presidencies to this unofficial rule.

However, when President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, the need for formalizing the line of presidential succession became apparent.

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To make matters worse, Lyndon B. Johnson, who became the 36th president after Kennedy’s death, went without a vice president for 14 months. In 1947, Truman signed the Presidential Succession Act, which outlined that if both the presidency and vice presidency were vacant, the line of succession would pass to the Speaker of the House, followed by the President pro tempore of the Senate. This meant that if anything had happened to Johnson — who “endured serious illnesses” — the next in line would have been 71-year-old John McCormack, followed by 86-year-old Carl Hayden.

In 1965, at Johnson's behest, Congress finalized what would become the 25th Amendment, which received the requisite three-fourths approval from the states on February 10, 1967. President Johnson, now serving his first full term with Hubert Humphrey as vice president, reacted to the news with a brief history lesson:

“It was 180 years ago,” he said, “in the closing days of the Constitutional Convention, that the Founding Fathers debated the question of Presidential disability. John Dickinson of Delaware asked this question: ‘What is the extent of the term ‘disability’ and who is to be the judge of it?’ No one replied.”

“It is hard to believe that until last week our Constitution provided no clear answer,” he continued. “Now, at last, the 25th amendment clarifies the crucial clause that provides for succession to the Presidency and for filling a Vice Presidential vacancy.”

The 25th Amendment did more than just certify the Tyler Precedent and permit the president to fill vacancies in the vice presidency: it also allowed for the vice president to serve as “acting president” in the event that the president is unable to discharge the duties of the office. Six years later, President Richard Nixon utilized the amendment, tapping Gerald Ford to serve as vice president following Spiro Agnew’s resignation; Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Joe Biden have invoked the 25th during medical procedures requiring sedation.

From John Tyler to Lyndon B. Johnson, the story of the 25th Amendment reminds us that, while the United States Constitution is an exceptional document that deserves to be interpreted and followed faithfully, it is not a perfect one. It is the duty of the people to use the Founders’ amendment process, outlined in Article V, to help make America a more perfect Union!

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