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Metabolizing and normalizing Donald Trump’s serial unhinged actions has become America’s least favorite pastime, and these past few weeks alone have featured threats to end an entire civilization, claims that the Pope is “weak on crime,” and a flirtation with himself starring in some freaky messianic wall art. Instead of attempting to comprehend and explain the unfathomable, or waiting mildly for the next episode, the Constitution constructs actual methods for removal of unfit leaders, methods we regularly debate without actually deploying. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick was joined by Rep. Jamie Raskin, who represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives and is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. He served as lead manager in the Trump impeachment trial for the events of Jan. 6, 2021. They discussed the constitutional remedies of impeachment and the 25th Amendment, and why abandoning them for political expediency is a mistake. An excerpt of their conversation, edited and condensed for clarity, appears below.

Dahlia Lithwick: Before we have a conversation about the 25th Amendment and impeachment and removal, I think it’s actually important to stake out the ways in which, when people dismiss all this as “just talk,” or some brilliant Mad King ploy, or that none of it really matters because he didn’t in fact end an entire civilization, why all those rationalizations are really wrongheaded and damaging. Maybe start by contextualizing how different, how dangerous, how violent and insupportable this kind of conduct is from the president of the United States. 

Jamie Raskin: Think of it from the perspective of the Framers. Like if Thomas Jefferson or James Madison were here, how would they respond to the whole situation? So you’ve got a war that was never declared by Congress, not authorized by Congress at all. A unilateral war where the president is then threatening nuclear devastation, which is obviously outside of the contemplation of the Framers. Someone threatening to destroy an entire civilization and to kill millions of people. All of which is to say that the Constitution wasn’t really set up for this, and the reason everybody has gravitated so quickly to the 25th Amendment is because it was adopted in 1967, in the nuclear age, and it’s the closest thing to capturing constitutional mechanics to address a profound crisis that shook people to the core.

So we can try to distance ourselves from what happened by saying it was either a mad genius act or it was just an act of political desperation to save face, so that he could later concoct a rationalization that he had forced a great settlement. But, in any event, the rhetorical outburst in itself was a profound assault on people’s sense of peace and security, and that’s why everybody is struggling to figure out what, within the constitutional context, we can do.

So let’s talk about that, because the two cures that are being bandied around again this week are impeachment and the 25th Amendment. None of this is new. We just cycle in and out of these conversations about the 25th and impeachment. I find myself just saying: Is it worth even having this conversation until and unless Democrats take the House?........

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