Pelosi’s 25th Amendment Show Aims ‘To Comfort’ American People
Oct. 9, 2020 (EIRNS)—In a performance today which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said was really intended to “comfort” the American people, and provide them with certainty about the future, Pelosi held a press conference with Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin to announce the introduction of legislation to create a bipartisan, pompously named “Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office,” to determine whether a President is fit for office under the terms of the 25th Amendment. Raskin had introduced a similar bill in 2017, which failed to pass, and no one expects a new bill to pass either. Rather, in typical lying fashion, Pelosi used today’s event, cloaked in feigned concern for the American people, to make her point that Donald Trump is not fit to be President—that, as she said in an interview with Bloomberg TV yesterday—he’s in an “altered state” and “disassociated from reality” because of medication he’s taking for COVID-19.
In response to this transparent maneuver, Trump quipped in a tweet today that Pelosi was really creating a mechanism to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris, because “Joe’s out of it!”
In the press conference, Pelosi lied that the proposal to create a bipartisan commission to judge a President’s fitness for office has absolutely nothing to do with Trump or the elections, but quickly threw in that “he shows a need for us to create a process for future Presidents,” which, she said, “honors the Constitution,” whose 25th Amendment allows for such a process. When a reporter asked whether Trump had met the threshold for invoking the 25th Amendment, constitutional law expert Raskin jumped in to cover for her, arguing for “thinking in Constitutional terms”—the whole process is bipartisan and bicameral: “We live in times of chaos, so the Speaker is creating a Constitutional process to deal with the chaos.”
Asked by another reporter, “how can this not be about this President?” Pelosi repeated that the proposal is not a judgment about “anyone’s behavior,” but about arriving at a diagnosis, and again asserting ad nauseam that, while Americans will make their decision in the November election, something must in place for when a President becomes incapacitated requiring a transfer of power. “This isn’t about the election at all.... We’re giving comfort to people,” she cooed.
Under the proposal, bipartisan Congressional leadership would select eight people from each party to serve on the commission which would also include physicians, psychiatrists, retired public officials and former members of the Executive branch, such as “former Presidents,” Vice Presidents, or Cabinet secretaries.
