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Presidential Disability: Past Experiences and Future Implications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Bert E. Park
Bert E. Park*
Affiliation:
Southwest Missouri Neurological Group, Inc., 1900 South National, Suite 2980, Springfield, Missouri 65804
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Extract

In 1967 Congress passed the Twenty-fifth Amendment to rectify an apparent inadequacy in the U. S. Constitution dealing with one of the gravest dangers to executive function–disability in the presidency. For 180 years, imprecise wording had bound the public welfare beneath a constitutional sword of Damocles which threatened to sever the legal discovery of inability in our Chief Executive from its occurrence. On at least four occasions during the last 100 years alone, executive function has been paralyzed by medically defined presidential inability, while two perplexing questions restricted a satisfactory resolution to the problem. First, in such a circumstance, does the office of the presidency devolve to the vice-president, or does the vicepresident merely serve as an acting president, assuming only its powers and duties? Second, who shall determine when the president is disabled and, its corollary, when that disability has ended? In the first instance, the amendment's sponsors ultimately determined that the vice-president assumes the powers and duties, but not the office itself, when the president becomes disabled. In the second, the sponsors proposed that the vice-president and the cabinet are jointly responsible for determining the duration of inability when, for medical or other reasons, the president is unable to do so.

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Articles
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Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 7 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Medicine and Political Behavior , August 1988 , pp. 50 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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