A Republican congressman from Texas is proposing legislation that would call on Vice President Kamala Harris to convene President Joe Biden’s cabinet and invoke the 25th amendment of the US Constitution.
Representative Chip Roy of Texas proposed the legislation after Biden’s lackluster debate performance against former president Donald Trump in Atlanta on Thursday.
Under the 25th amendment of the US Constitution, the vice president and the majority of cabinet officers can declare “that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and that the vice president may assume the duties of the presidency.
The legislation put forward by Roy specifically claims that Biden has “repeatedly and publicly demonstrated his inability to discharge the powers and duties of the presidency.”
“We'll be filing it today or early next week, depending on the language being drafted,” Roy told The Independent.
He said he came up with the idea on Friday morning. “It's not a particularly ingenious idea,” he added. “...But I think it's incumbent upon members of Congress to at least call what we see, which is that the president of the United States is not able to carry out duties.”
Roy is a member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. As a former chief of staff to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, he played a role in Cruz’s shutting down of the federal government in 2013 in an attempt to defund Obamacare. Last year, he was part of a coterie of right-wing Republicans who blocked Kevin McCarthy from becoming speaker before he ultimately flipped his vote.
But Roy also voted to certify the 2020 presidential election and endorsed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which prompted Trump to call for a primary challenger against him.
Other Republicans said that Democrats would need to answer for Biden’s poor performance.
“I've been saying for two years that Joe Biden is a drag on House Democrats,” Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told The Independent.
Representative Marc Molinaro of New York, who represents a district Biden won in 2020 and Trump won in 2016, told The Independent: “I think the American people saw with the president’s performance something they didn't necessarily want want to acknowledge. I think the president put on full display yesterday that he's just not capable enough to serve another four years, but that many Democrats knew this as well.”
