Vice–President Harris Should Invoke the 25th Amendment to Relieve Biden of his Presidential Duties

Biden had a terrible debate.  Everyone knows that except for him.  Polls suggest collapsing support for Biden among voters in the critical swing states but also in places such as New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Virginia.  There is panic and pressure among donors for him to halt his presidential race, release his delegates, and let someone else run.  So far Biden has resisted these calls.

            But assume this happens. Assume Biden is unfit to continue his presidential candidacy.  Forcing him off the presidential ticket implicates another question–is he fit to continue as president and should Vice-President Harris and the cabinet invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and relieve him of his presidential duties?

            So far the focus of Biden’s debate performance has been on whether he should continue his presidential campaign.  Stories are increasing noting how is aides have witnessed  Biden’s decline in the last few months.  There are serious questions about his capacity to run, win, and serve a second term.  But if the conclusion is that he is mentally unfit to serve a second term, that forces the question whether he should even continue serving as president.

            Biden has to make the choice to discontinue his presidential run. One need not wait for Biden to make a choice to relieve him of his presidential duties.  According to Section Four of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment:

 

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

 

The people closest to Biden in his administration know best the president’s mental acuity.  They know whether he is fit to serve.  The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was put into place exactly to address the problem we see now where a sitting president may be so mentally incapacitated that he does not know he is incapacitated.

            Were this scenario to occur,  Harris would assume the duties of the presidency. Foremost, this decision would protect the US from a president who may not longer be fit to serve.  Second, the choice to do this may serve as a backdoor way of removing Biden as a presidential candidate. It would place enormous pressure on Biden to end his presidential debate and on the national delegates to reconsider another candidate.

            Of course, some may think this would be a conflict of interest for Harris to do this—given that she would become acting president and presumptively the Democrats' presidential candidate. In response, the check on Harris is the rest of  Biden’s cabinet.  Second, there is no guarantee that  at the Democratic National Convention Harris would be named the  nominee.

            Overall, the debate on Biden’s fitness as a candidate also raises questions about his fitness to continue to serve as president.  His decision to end his campaign would force  this latter question.  But independent of that choice, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment addresses a potentially more immediate problem that might also  indirectly  address the former.

What's in a word? Candidate language in the first Trump Biden debate

 

So much focus of the analysis of the Trump Biden debate was on how the candidates appeared or how they performed and very little analysis has been given to what they said or the words they chose to use. While fact checkers noted that the content of what the two candidates said varied in terms of how truthful they were, what also becomes interesting is to look at the words two candidates chose to use and what it says about their two campaigns.

            Eight years ago, I did an analysis of the acceptance speeches by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at the respective Democratic and  Republican National Conventions.

            What I found was that Hillary Clinton spoke at an approximate thirteenth or college-level vocabulary. A high percentage of her words were polysyllabic . A high percentage of her words were conceptual as opposed to effective or feeling.

            For Trump, he spoke at a seventh grade level, with few polysyllabic words and with terms that were more effective or emotive.

            One could not have found a greater contrast between the two candidates in terms of the words they chose to use.

            The first Biden Trump presidential debate produced a transcript of the words they chose to use. I analyzed their comments, producing word clouds for each.   For Donald Trump his top four words were country, border, history, and money. For Biden, his top four were idea, number, president and fact. Clearly the two chose to emphasize different words in their speech, reflecting different themes. In fact, of the ten most frequent words each of them used only the words country, history, and president repeated for both of them.

            When it came to Donald Trump in his debate, he spoke 8170 words. His average sentence was 11.2 words.  Of those words 11% or 902 or polysyllabic. Additionally, 65% or 5345 were monosyllabic. According to the Dale-Chali readability index, Trump spoke at a 7.8 grade level.

            For Joe Biden. He spoke a total of 6896 words. His average sentence was 14 words long. Of the words he spoke 64.7%  were monosyllabic, with  10.9% or 755 or polysyllabic. He spoke at an eighth grade level.

            In many ways, Trump and Biden chose different words, but spoke roughly at the same level of readability or intelligibility. This is in sharp contrast to Clinton versus Trump eight years earlier.

            What might we make of this convergence in terms of readability?  Both candidates aimed their comments at a small cluster of 150,000 to 200,000 voters who may not be paying a lot of attention to the election. They are pitched at a level roughly where many newspapers and new shows are. They spoke at a level aimed to maximize viewer cognition or ability to understand their terms and concepts.  Of course, they way they delivered their words and the meaning those words conveyed  also are important.  But together they all speak to why words matter.