@SteveBellovin , I did some checking on the mechanics and game theory surrounding 25th Amendment Section 4 (25A4, for short). For purposes of that section, which will be uppermost in whatever remains of Дональд Дж. Трамп's mind, not all of the Cabinet matters: The Cabinet isn't even a Consitutional entity; merely inferred.
The 25th would be applied by VP Vance plus the "principal officers of the executive department" [sic, should be plural], who currently number 15 (State, Treasury, Defense, AG, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, HHS, HUD, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans, Homeland). Трамп could be benched by Vance and any 8 out of those 15. Which is one reason Трамп will appoint only bootlickers to those 15.
Last go-around, Трамп very often dealt with vacancies among those 15 by having "acting" heads in place who were not Senate-confirmed, which in a way is a second way of stacking the 25th Amendment deck, as those occupants (probably?) lack a vote in any 25th Amend. tally.
I'm actually uncertain how vacancies affect application of the phrase "the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department" in 25th Amendment, Section 4. If, say, seven of the 15 seats are held by "acting" appointees not confirmed by the Senate, then does it take 8 votes to 25th the President, or only 5?
All "principal officers of the executive departments" and all other Cabinet officials serve at the President's pleasure. So, he can kneecap the former with the stroke of a pen, filling that office with a not-confirmed placeholder.
The former phrase's scope is amendable by Congress, and the current tally of 15 is per 5 U.S.C. § 101.
A President's easiest way of avoiding being 25th, however, would be assign believed-loyal Secret Service agents -- always a pair, folloiwng the Mormon missionary principle -- with orders to call immediately if "principal officers" rendezvous iwth the VP. The president can then spend about 20 seconds firing those officers.
Legal scholars have worried before about the potential for constitutional crisis from ambiguities in 25A4, e.g., https://info.cooley.edu/blog/what-does-the-25th-amendment-mean-by-acting-cabinet-officers .
This law school journal piece thinks "majority" in 25A4 means a majority of the executive departments filled with Senate-cofirmed appointees, not a majority of all executive departments. https://lawreview.sf.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk15026/files/media/documents/54-online-Krishnamurthi_Salib1.pdf
In fact, the authors also address the edge case of a President who's fired all 15 principal officers of executive departments, replacing them with cronies (or leave them empty), suspecting he/she's about to be 25th'ed, by declaring that a "majority" of zero officers should be zero, i.e., that the Veep could then 25th the President unilaterally.
Reading history, it actually seems like what impelled 25A4 (year 1965) was, first, Eisenhower's two periods of medical incapacity in '55 and '56, and, of all things, the 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny and its 1954 film version -- e.g., fear of President Queeg.
Трамп has announced picks for 3 (so far) of the 15 "principal officers of executive departments" relevant to 25A4: Marco Rubio for State, Kristi Noem (puppy and family-goat assassin) for Homeland, and Pete Hegseth for Defense. These all look to this observer like "abject flunkie" picks, matching my hypothesis -- Hegseth being the most absurd of the lot, being a Fox News talking head and former Koch brothers tool whose military connection was limited to being a captain in the National Guard for a decade.
Random historical tidbit related to 25A but not 25A4: Kamala Harris actually was President (Acting President under 25A3) from 10:10am to 11:35am on Nov. 19, 2021, while Biden was undergoing colonoscopy.
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