California’s governor reached for the Constitution’s emergency exit over a rally line, and the exit, as usual, stayed shut.
SACRAMENTO – Gavin Newsom wants the 25th Amendment. Not a law. Not a hearing. The amendment you use when the president can’t do the job. Trigger, in this case: he found California on a map, out loud, from Nebraska.
What the 25th Amendment Is Actually For
What’s the deal with the 25th. It’s sitting there for a stroke, a coma, a situation with doctors and a Cabinet and everybody looking at their shoes. We’ve turned it into a customer-service line. Hello, yes, I didn’t like the sentence, can I speak to the amendment. The amendment says it’ll be with you shortly. The amendment has been with you shortly since 1967.
If you’ve never read the thing, the full text of the 25th Amendment at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute takes about four minutes. Section 4 is the one everybody keeps waving around. The vice president and a majority of the Cabinet have to put in writing that the president is unable to discharge his duties. If the president disagrees, it goes to Congress, and Congress needs two-thirds of both chambers to keep him sidelined. Two-thirds. Of this Congress. I’ll wait while you stop laughing.
Newsom’s Call After the Los Angeles and San Diego Remarks
The line was let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. White House says he meant those cities would’ve been threatened if the war hadn’t happened. Newsom says the sentence doesn’t need a decoder ring. Both of these men are having the time of their lives. One got a clip. One got a statement. The amendment got a mention, which is all it ever gets. It’s the most famous unused tool in a garage full of unused tools.
The original CBS Los Angeles report on the rally remarks has the quote in context, and a legal commentary write-up of Newsom’s 25th Amendment demand walks through why the demand lands as politics rather than procedure. Different readers will come away from those two pieces with different feelings, and I suspect that was the plan.
Why Section 4 Is a Math Problem, Not a Press Release
You need the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to even start this. JD Vance spent the day talking about uranium percentages. He did not look like a man collecting signatures. Cabinet secretaries like their jobs. That’s the whole firewall. You can’t remove a guy with the help of people he hired, unless the guy has wandered into traffic. A rally riff is not traffic. It’s a riff. Nebraska has a lot of both.
Newsom’s office briefed reporters on Section 4 with the confidence of people who read the summary twice and found it sturdy. A lawyer in the orbit said the 25th is for impairment, not a bad night at the fairgrounds, and that this has never slowed a press release. Correct. The press release doesn’t practice law. The press release practices distribution.
A little history helps here. The amendment was ratified in 1967, in the long shadow of the Kennedy assassination, because the country had noticed it had no clean plan for a disabled president. It has been used since, mostly for the dull stuff. George W. Bush handed over power briefly in 2002 and again in 2007 while he was under sedation for a colonoscopy, and Joe Biden did the same in 2021. Section 4, the involuntary one, has never been invoked. Not once in almost sixty years. So when a governor demands it over a speech, he’s asking for something nobody has ever actually received, and he knows it, and so does everyone who retweeted him.
The Midterm Politics Behind the Demand
Republicans said he’s running for a job he doesn’t have. In California that’s a full-time position with benefits. Democrats know the mechanism isn’t going anywhere four weeks before a midterm. The call wasn’t a procedure. It was a headline that fits on a phone. That’s the current jurisdiction. If it doesn’t fit on a phone, it isn’t a constitutional event. If it does, bring the framers, they’ve got notes.
I keep trying to picture the actual meeting where this got approved. Somebody says “what if we invoke the 25th.” Somebody else says “we can’t, we don’t have the votes.” And a third person, probably holding a coffee, says “we don’t need the votes, we need the afternoon.” That’s the whole strategy. It was never about the amendment. It was about winning Wednesday.
A Bakersfield Gas Station Owner Weighs In
A station owner outside Bakersfield said he’d support any section of the Constitution that knocks fifty cents off regular. He does not expect Section 4 to do it. Section 4 has never touched a pump. Section 4 doesn’t have a car. By Wednesday the demand had done the full lap: statement, outrage, panel, joke, forgetting. The amendment went back in the drawer. California stayed on the map, right where everybody said it was, which was the original complaint.