Presumed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer asked Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th amendment to remove President Donald Trump from office.
“What happened at the United States Capitol yesterday was an insurrection against the United States, incited by the president,” said Schumer, DN.Y., in a statement on Thursday. “This president should not be in office for another day.”
Schumer joins a growing contingent of lawmakers on both sides to call for Trump’s removal, either using the 25th amendment or by impeachment.
“The quickest and most effective way – this can be done today – to remove that president from office would be for the vice president to immediately invoke the 25th amendment,” said Schumer. “If the vice president and the cabinet refuse to stand, Congress must meet again to remove the president,” he added.
Under a provision in Amendment 25, the vice president may, with the support of the majority of the president’s office, invoke the measure and declare Trump unfit for office, which could lead to his early dismissal. In such a scenario, the vice president would immediately take over as interim president.
The attack on the Capitol came after Trump spoke to the crowd, encouraging them to march to the building and saying, “You will never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
The previous Thursday, Congressman Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., Asked Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office, becoming the first Republican to do so.
In an interview with MSNBC, Kinzinger criticized Trump as “disconnected, not just from his duty, or even from his oath, but from reality itself” and said that Pence and the rest of Trump’s office needed to invoke the measure “to end with that nightmare. “
“The president is not in shape and the president is not well. And the president must now relinquish control of the executive branch voluntarily or involuntarily, ”he said.
Several sources familiar with the matter told NBC News on Wednesday that there were informal discussions about the invocation of the 25th Amendment among officials of the Trump administration.
It is not clear whether cabinet-level officials discussed the issue; two sources said the issue was not addressed with Pence, who would need to agree with the majority of the Cabinet to authorize the vice president under the 25th Amendment.
The talks were fueled in part by concerns of unrest and insurrection across the U.S. in the next two weeks, before President-elect Joe Biden took office as president on the 20th.
Prominent members of both parties, however, have also warned against taking drastic measures – albeit for extremely different reasons.
Brian Fallon, the executive director of the progressive Supreme Court reform group Demand Justice, who served as Hillary Clinton’s press secretary during the 2016 campaign, tweeted that invoking the 25th Amendment would be just a “copout” for Republicans, which he accused of not holding Trump accountable.
Meanwhile, John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser for nearly 18 months in 2018-2019, said that invoking the measure would further inflame tensions in the U.S.
“I recognize that this is dangerous, but I will say again, we must keep in mind the saying ‘don’t hurt’, because you can make things worse if we are not careful,” he told CNN late on Wednesday.
