House Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday that there should be high-level Cabinet-level discussions about invoking the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove President Biden from office, following the disastrous performance in the previous night’s debate.
“A lot of people are asking about invoking the 25th Amendment right now because this is an alarming situation,” Rep. Johnson, R-Louisiana, told reporters. “Our opponents, like all of us, see the weaknesses in this White House.”
“I would ask my cabinet members to do some soul searching,” he added. “If I was a Democrat right now and the nominee was me, I’d panic too. I think they know they have a serious problem.”
“But this isn’t just a political issue, this isn’t just a Democratic issue, this is a national issue,” Johnson said. “We have a president who is clearly not up to the task, and we have serious problems.”
The 25th Amendment, proposed by Congress after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1965 and ratified by the states two years later, allows the Cabinet to declare the president unfit to serve and for the vice president to replace him.
The 81-year-old Biden got off to a stumble during the CNN debate, speaking with a raspy voice that aides blamed on a cold and freezing in pain while trying to answer questions early in the debate.
“Everybody here made a mistake,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), a Biden campaign surrogate, told reporters on Friday when asked about the president’s staring into space and then incoherent statement that his administration had “finally defeated Medicare.”
A hastily conducted poll after the exchange of words showed that more than eight in 10 Post readers said the president should drop out of the race and not seek reelection.
But a senior White House adviser told CNN on Friday morning that Biden is already preparing to return to the debate stage with the 78-year-old Trump in September, a statement the president backed up at an afternoon rally in North Carolina.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) was the first to deny talk of a leadership change, while former party leaders such as Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) have merely acknowledged that Biden “wasn’t great” and had a “bad night.”
Many House Democrats avoided answering questions from reporters on Capitol Hill on Friday about whether the president was capable of serving another four years or willing to attend a second debate with his Republican opponent.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) said it was “wrong” for the Biden campaign to agree to appear on CNN and said he would not recommend another debate with “the same ground rules” that would make real-time fact-checking impossible.
“There are two schools of thought,” Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.), a battleground state representative, explained to The Post. “Some of them are immediate. [Sen. John] Fetterman’s approach is, you know, this was just a bad night.”
“But I think most people are doing the political equivalent of a drive-by shooting,” Molinaro said, referring to the pundits and anonymous strategists who blasted Biden in the aftermath of the debate and called for him to drop out of the race.
“I think President Biden has clearly demonstrated that he cannot serve another four years, and I think a lot of people felt that way before last night’s debate,” he added. “A lot of Democrats and Republicans have felt that way for months now.”
House Republicans are battling Attorney General Merrick Garland over audio recordings of a special counsel’s October 2023 interview with Biden, part of an investigation that found Biden “knowingly” hoarded classified documents after leaving the vice presidency.
The House of Representatives passed a partisan resolution earlier this month to hold Garland in contempt for turning over records of Biden’s meetings with special counsel Robert Hur but not releasing audio tapes.
Hoare wrote that he ultimately chose not to indict Biden because a federal jury would likely view the president as “a caring, well-meaning elderly man with a limited memory.”
“The president of the United States has instructed the attorney general not to turn over the tapes,” Johnson said Friday. “After last night’s debate, I think we all understand very clearly why that is.”
“There’s a good chance that what he sounds like on tape will be exactly the same as the way he spoke onstage last night,” Johnson explained. “It’s embarrassing for the president.”
