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Lynn Schmidt explains how a strong 25th Amendment would protect the presidency itself "by ensuring smooth transitions and public confidence in executive leadership..."
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Presidential Incapacity and the Limits of the 25th Amendment
Sep 08, 2025
The authors of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution established and explained the complete order of presidential succession, as well as a series of contingency plans to fill any executive vacancies. It was written as a response to the weaknesses found in Article II after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and what was learned about the inadequacies related to presidential illnesses and hospitalizations.
It feels like the time is not only right but needed for another updated response.
On June 27, 2024, Americans joined the rest of the world in watching the infamous presidential debate between then President Joe Biden and then former President Donald Trump. Yet, despite watching with our own eyes a president of the United States unable to complete a coherent thought, Biden remained in the presidency for 207 days afterwards.
The attention immediately went to the presidential race, and very few focused on whether or not Biden could complete his term in office. So as America grapples with an aging political class, the question of reforming the 25th Amendment must become part of the country’s discourse.
The 25th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1967, was designed to address presidential succession and disability in an era of nuclear weapons and global superpower responsibilities. Yet nearly six decades later, this constitutional provision has proven inadequate for the realities of modern governance, revealing dangerous gaps that leave America vulnerable during presidential health crises.
Our most recent history reveals critical flaws with the current version that demand constitutional reform. The amendment's ambiguous language, cumbersome procedures, and insufficient safeguards create dangerous vulnerabilities in our democratic system that must be addressed.
The amendment's most glaring weakness lies in Section 4, which addresses presidential incapacity when the president cannot or will not acknowledge their disability.
The process requires the vice president and a majority of cabinet members to declare the president unable to perform their duties—a standard that is both too vague and too political. What constitutes “inability to discharge the powers and duties” remains undefined, leaving interpretation to officials who serve at the president's pleasure and may face retaliation.
Cabinet members, appointed by and loyal to the president, are unlikely to vote against their benefactor except in the most extreme circumstances. The amendment essentially asks political appointees to commit political career suicide while navigating a constitutional crisis—a recipe for paralysis and politicization when decisive action is needed most.
A reformed 25th Amendment should establish clearer standards and more independent mechanisms for determining presidential incapacity.
The amendment should define specific criteria for incapacity, including mental illness, cognitive decline, substance abuse, or any condition that substantially impairs judgment or decision-making capacity. While some flexibility must remain for unforeseen circumstances, basic parameters would provide essential guidance.
The determination process of a president’s capacity should be removed from purely political actors. Instead of relying solely on cabinet members, a reformed amendment could replace the current system's reliance on political intuition with medical expertise.
An update to the amendment must also account for technological and national security realities unknown to the 1960s drafters. The president's role in nuclear command and control requires special consideration. The procedures for transferring such responsibilities cannot wait for lengthy political deliberations. The amendment should establish protocols for immediate temporary transfer of critical national security authorities while broader capacity questions are resolved.
The reformed amendment should also address transparency and attempt to restore public trust and confidence. While medical privacy deserves protection, the American people have a right to know about their president's fitness for office. Balanced disclosure requirements could provide necessary public information without unnecessarily violating personal privacy.
Additionally, the amendment should address succession beyond the vice president more comprehensively. The current system assumes the vice president will be available and capable, but simultaneous incapacity of both officials remains possible. Clear protocols should extend further down the line of succession while maintaining constitutional principles.
With our current hyperpolarized society, changes are not likely to be enacted, especially because the amendment process is arduous and is intentionally difficult, requiring a broad consensus that reflects the gravity of changing our fundamental law.
Reform advocates should emphasize that a stronger 25th Amendment protects the presidency itself by ensuring smooth transitions and public confidence in executive leadership and that the proposed reforms serve the national interest rather than partisan advantage. A clear, fair, and efficient system for addressing presidential incapacity strengthens rather than weakens our constitutional order.
The 25th Amendment was a crucial step forward in 1967, but constitutional evolution must continue. By addressing its shortcomings now, we can ensure that future generations inherit a more perfect system for preserving democratic governance in times of crisis.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. testifies before the Senate Finance Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on September 04, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
The State of Health in America: A Political and Scientific Crossfire
Sep 07, 2025
At the heart of the Trump administration’s health agenda is a dramatic reorientation of public health priorities. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared during a Senate hearing last week:
“We at HHS are enacting a once-in-a-generation shift from a sick-care system, to a true health care system that tackles the root causes of chronic disease.”
“Make America Healthy Again” has been met with both praise and fierce resistance. Republican Senator Mike Crapo supported the initiative, saying:
“President Trump and Secretary Kennedy have made a steadfast commitment to make America healthy again”.
Kennedy’s long-standing skepticism of vaccines has become central to his tenure.
Chronic illness, environmental toxicity, and mental health neglect have long plagued our systems. But when that vision is paired with vaccine suspicion, the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez, and a panel stacked with anti-vaccine voices, the promise begins to fracture.
Monarez, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, accused Kennedy of pressuring her to:
“Compromise science itself” and approve recommendations from a panel “filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric”.
Kennedy’s response? “The people at the CDC who oversaw [COVID-19 mitigation]... are the people who will be leaving.” That’s not reform. That’s purging.
Senator Tina Smith challenged Kennedy directly:
“When were you lying, sir – when you told this committee that you were not anti-vax? Or when you told Americans that there's no safe and effective vaccine?”
Kennedy replied: “Both things are true”.
Former CDC directors and health professionals have condemned Kennedy’s approach. In a joint op-ed, they warned:
“Public health shouldn’t be partisan. Vaccines have saved millions of lives under administrations of both parties. Parents deserve a CDC they can trust to put children above politics, evidence above ideology and facts above fear”.
Senator John Barrasso, a physician, added:
“I’m a doctor. Vaccines work”.
When trust erodes, so does the very architecture of care. The tug of war between Kennedy’s populist health reform, Trump’s political backing, and the scientific community’s alarm has left America’s health landscape deeply polarized. As Kennedy invoked his father’s legacy:
“Progress is a nice word, but change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.”
The question remains: will this change heal or harm?
Public health is not a stage for performance—it’s a covenant with the people. And right now, that covenant is being rewritten in ink that smudges truth with ideology.
While this political theater unfolds, the communities most devastated by COVID-19—Latino and Black families—remain largely unacknowledged in the administration’s rhetoric.
In Louisiana, Black residents made up 70% of COVID-19 deaths, despite being only 32% of the population. Latino patients in the West and Midwest were hospitalized at rates over nine times higher than non-Hispanic Whites during the pandemic’s peak. These aren’t just numbers. They’re testimonies of structural neglect.
The virus didn’t discriminate, but our systems did. Marginalized communities faced compounded risks: frontline jobs without protections, multigenerational housing that made isolation impossible, and limited access to care. Vaccine rollout was uneven. Trust was fractured.
The state of health in America isn’t just a tug-of-war between Kennedy, Trump, and the CDC. It’s a reckoning.
Will we build a health system rooted in dignity, science, and mutual recognition—or will we let force of personality and chaos dictate the terms of our survival?
America’s health deserves more than slogans. It deserves stewardship.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
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An image depicting a map of a district with unusually shaped boundaries, highlighting how areas are divided in a non-compact or fragmented way.
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When Politicians Pick Voters: Why Gerrymandering Is Undermining Democracy
Sep 06, 2025
The partisan fight to draw maps that determine how Americans are represented has entered a dangerous spiral. Texas is racing ahead with a mid-decade congressional redraw designed to lock in additional seats after President Donald J. Trump called upon state lawmakers to find five seats. California’s leaders responded in kind to offset the Texas map, but will hold a special election in which voters must decide whether to put aside the state’s Congressional maps drawn by an independent redistricting commission for the next three election cycles. Other states are openly weighing similar moves. But this “map wars” logic is dangerous, and voters from all backgrounds stand to lose as districts harden into safe seats and politicians’ accountability to voters further withers.
Large majorities of Americans say that gerrymandering — which lets politicians pick their voters instead of the other way around — is unfair and a problem. When politicians and party insiders draw their own districts, the maps can be engineered to protect incumbents, not voters. As a result, gerrymandering contributes to the erosion of public confidence in elections. It lessens people’s sense that change can happen, and reduces the ability of voters to hold leaders accountable.
At a moment when the public expresses wide dissatisfaction with how democracy is working, voters’ practical ability to sanction or replace unresponsive leaders is critical. Gerrymandering entrenches incumbents by design, converting general elections into “safe” seats and shifting accountability to narrow primaries. When districts are engineered to be noncompetitive in November, the decisive contest moves to low-turnout primaries, where smaller, less representative electorates set the outcome. As a result, elected leaders face weaker incentives to answer to the broader electorate in their district.
Furthermore, scholars have linked electoral competition to specific behaviors, such as attentiveness and service. With fewer close races, representatives have less incentive to adjust to district preferences or provide constituent services—consistent with findings that gerrymandering produces less-responsive representation, even when national seat totals barely change. Safe districts lower the probability that voters can oust an elected leader who is not responsive to their needs or doesn’t perform well.
National evidence shows the share of competitive districts shrinks under partisan map-drawing, with candidates increasingly catering to primary electorates rather than general-election voters. Conversely, evidence suggests that when states remove partisan control from redistricting, for example, by using independent commissions, close contests become more common and incumbent party wins fall. Some critics of commissions claim they are a mirage, pointing to weak models that have left politicians in charge. That’s precisely the point: design matters. Commissions that remove partisan vetoes, work in the open, and follow voter-protective criteria produce fairer, more competitive maps than legislative self-dealing.
In addition, gerrymandering fractures communities, especially communities of color, thereby reducing their ability to hold representatives accountable or reward them. Cracking and packing dilute a community’s ability to elect a candidate of choice, undermining the threat of replacement that underpins accountability. (This is why Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act focuses on vote dilution, and recent enforcement has measurably increased participation where remedial districts were drawn.)
The current gerrymandering wars illustrate the consequences of this issue. In Texas, voting-rights groups have sued, arguing the new map will prevent Black voters from electing candidates of their choice. In California, the very idea of suspending an independent commission to pursue a partisan counter-map has drawn fire across the civic spectrum. Treating redistricting as retaliation doesn’t correct the problem; it normalizes it. Courts can police some abuses (for example, racial vote dilution), but the Supreme Court has said federal courts won’t referee claims of pure partisan gerrymandering. That leaves a large gray zone and a perpetual arms race where the rules depend on who holds power unless states adopt durable guardrails themselves.
Democracy is a promise that power originates from the people and can be reclaimed by them. Accountability is how that promise is kept. Without it, elections are merely a formality, and representation is simply a label, not a reality. Accountability requires contestability: when a realistic chance of being replaced exists, elected leaders have reason to listen and adapt. Gerrymandering’s purpose is to reduce contestability by insulating seats from swings in voter opinion, shifting power to narrow primaries, and diluting cohesive communities, thereby predictably weakening electoral accountability.
The choice is not between one party’s gerrymander and the other’s; it’s between a permanent power struggle and a system built for and accountable to voters. Indeed, a Utah court just reminded the country who holds the pen in a democracy when it struck down its 2021 congressional map and ordered new lines consistent with voter-approved reforms, affirming that the people are the locus of political power and have a constitutional right to reform their government. The longer we fight fire with fire, the more scorched our democracy becomes. The better path forward is fair maps, drawn in public, by institutions answerable to the people, and an upgrade in how we elect leaders so that leaders are responsive and accountable to the broader electorates they serve.
Carah Ong Whaley is executive director of Better Choices for Democracy, a national nonpartisan reform organization working on election system reform.
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Photo by Tiffany Tertipes on Unsplash.
Is Trump Serious About Banning Mail-In Ballots… or Is It Rage-Bait?
Sep 05, 2025
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social, claiming he was going to “lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots,” adding that he would sign an executive order ahead of the 2026 midterms. However, Trump has yet to sign such an order.
This raises the question if Trump’s threat is serious or if he is merely baiting political opponents – especially when a quick Google search will tell anyone that the president doesn’t have the authority to implement such a policy.
But critics have spoken out.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has recently adopted the strategy of mocking the president by copying his social media style, said Trump’s call to ban mail-in ballots “reeks of desperation,” and called it another way Trump wants “to cook the results.”
If a nationwide ban did happen, California would be one of the hardest hit states as it allows no-excuse absentee voting. This means all registered voters are eligible to vote by mail. In fact, most Californians do.
Of the more than 16 million ballots cast in California last year, a little over 13 million were sent by mail.
However, putting the political theater aside – a nationwide ban on mail-in ballots would be extremely difficult because each state makes its own rules and to change anything about congressional elections would take more than a presidential proclamation.
It would take an act of Congress.
Who Controls the Rules on Mail-In Ballots?
The Constitution does not give the president any authority to make or change election law. The role of the Executive Branch is to enforce existing laws passed by Congress, and the purpose of an executive order is to direct members of the branch on how to enforce current law.
Congress has the authority under the Constitution to adopt election rules that pertain to federal elections only, but while the U.S. House has advanced more demanding voter ID requirements at the federal level under the SAVE Act, it hasn’t touched mail-in voting.
At least, not yet.
By design, the U.S. has a highly decentralized election system: states control the rules for how elections are administered, from registration to ballot counting. This is why states can have different primary election systems, voter ID requirements, and windows for early voting.
Some states conduct most of their elections entirely by mail while some limit who is eligible to even request a mail-in or absentee ballot. Half of states have a citizen-initiative process, allowing for voters to engage in direct democracy, and half don’t.
The point is elections vary considerably depending on where someone lives in the U.S. So, when Trump says states are “merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government” and must do what the president tells them – this isn’t true (particularly in this case).
In the Federalist Papers, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton described the intent of the Framers of the Constitution to find a “happy combination” between a structured federal Republic with a purer form of democracy for every state. (See Federalist No. 10)
So as critics of the president raise alarm bells over what they call a threat to election integrity – there isn’t actually much Trump can do on his own and they know that even as they try to escalate the rhetoric by claiming the “end of democracy as we know it.”
The Landscape of Absentee and Mail-in Voting Across States
As mentioned, each state has its own rules about mail-in and absentee voting. Five states – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, Washington – hold elections almost entirely by mail, and these states tend to have the highest voter turnouts each election cycle.
Additionally, California, Nevada, and Vermont allow all elections to be conducted by mail, but don’t require it and make it easy for citizens to vote by mail. Right now, 36 states plus DC allow no-excuse absentee voting – meaning voters don’t have to provide justification to vote by mail.
This includes many Republican-controlled states like Arizona, Florida, Nebraska, Ohio, and states that get a lot of media attention each election like Georgia and North Carolina. In Ohio, for example, 1.1 million voters cast a ballot by mail in 2024.
According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, about 30% of all ballots in 2024 were cast by mail, and while there isn’t a complete party breakdown on how mail-in voters affiliated politically, Pew Research recently found 58% of voters support no-excuse mail-in voting.
The survey didn’t break it down further to see how support for mail-in ballots changed if states required citizens to justify a need for them, whether because of age, physical disability, or geographical barriers that make it hard to get to a polling location on time.
The issue presented by the president, his opposition, the press, and even the pollsters is "all or nothing," instead of a comprehensive examination of the issue.
The Stakes Are Not as High as Americans Are Expected to Believe
Trump claims mail-in ballots lead to massive voter fraud. His opponents claim an executive order to ban mail-in ballots will “cook the results.” What if both sides are wrong?
In a media and political environment that expects people to pick a side between Trump and his Democratic opposition, there is no room for nuance.
And if the individual picks the wrong side, they are braindead, evil, side with fascism, or want to cheat in elections. (The accusations fall from both sides.)
The reality is, there is an opportunity to have a comprehensive national conversation about the way we cast ballots in the U.S.
For example, when Trump says mail-in ballots lead to massive voter fraud there is no hard evidence to support the claim. IVN has featured analyses that dive into the mechanisms in place in states like Colorado to protect against voter fraud in mail-in elections.
But the absence of fraud does not mean there aren’t legitimate concerns that abuse can take place when it comes to things like ballot harvesting, which occurs when individuals or groups collect and turn in ballots on people’s behalf.
In 2022, 4 people pleaded guilty in North Carolina to misdemeanors for their roles in absentee ballot fraud in the 2016 and 2018 elections, which resulted in an investigation and a do-over election – fraud that stemmed from ballot harvesting, which is illegal in the state.
AP reports:
Some of the workers said they were directed to collect blank or incomplete ballots, forge signatures on them and even fill in votes for local candidates. It is generally against the law in North Carolina for anyone other than the voter or a family member to handle someone’s completed ballot.”
It is understandable why people would be concerned about political operatives intentionally mishandling or manipulating other people’s ballots for their own self-interests or gains. There are several states that restrict who is allowed to return a person’s ballot.
But in California – state law allows individuals and groups not related or even associated with a voter to collect their ballots. The use of ballot harvesting in the state has drawn national attention, and anyone can collect a voter’s ballot under the law as long as:
- They do not receive compensation for the amount of ballots collected;
- Sign the ballot envelope and state their relationship to the voter; and
- Return ballots collected in-person or put them in the mail no later than 3 days from the date the ballots were received.
Notably, a ballot won’t be disqualified if it is returned after the 3-day deadline or if the collector doesn’t sign it as long as it is returned by election day. So, these requirements are essentially pointless.
Ballot drop boxes were set up in 2020 by the California GOP, and despite stirring controversy – the state’s Democratic leaders said it was perfectly legal. In fact, legal analysts said under the law someone could stand on the street corner and collect ballots.
While the party eventually removed the drop boxes, President Trump encouraged their continued use.
There is no evidence of widespread abuse or fraud in California elections. However, the fraud committed in North Carolina, where ballot harvesting is illegal, is case-in-point that the potential for mischief and misconduct exists.
These deeper conversations fall by the wayside when voters are expected to look at the issue as “Trump is right about everything” or “Trump is a would-be fascist that is going to blow up democracy.”
Understanding how difficult it would be to implement a ban on mail-in voting across the U.S. and looking at how popular mail-in ballots are (even Trump has cast his ballots via mail), it’s quite possible the president simply wants to bait his political opponents.
And his opponents seem all too eager to take it – giving both sides an excuse to escalate the rhetoric to infinitely high stakes that don’t actually exist but deepen the partisan divide and keep people in a state of panic.
Is Trump Serious About Banning Mail-In Ballots… or Is It Rage-Bait? was originally published by Independent Voter News and is republished with permission.
Shawn Griffiths Is An Election Reform Expert And National Editor Of IVN.us.
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