House Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday that high-level discussions should be taking place in President Biden’s cabinet about invoking the 25th Amendment to make him step down after a disastrous debate performance the night before.
“There’s a lot of people asking about invoking the 25th Amendment right now, because this is an alarming situation,” Johnson (R-La.) told reporters. “Our adversaries see the weakness in this White House, as we all do.”
“I would ask the cabinet members to search their hearts,” he added. “I would be panicking too if I were a Democrat today and that was my nominee. I think they know they have a serious problem.”
“But it’s not just political, it’s not just the Democratic Party — it’s the entire country,” Johnson assessed. “We have a serious problem here because we have a president who by all appearances is not up to the task.”
The 25th Amendment, proposed by Congress in 1965 following the assassination of John F. Kennedy and ratified by the states two years later, allows the cabinet to declare the president unfit to discharge the duties of office — and be succeeded by the vice president.
Biden, 81, stumbled right out of the gate in the CNN debate. He spoke with a raspy voice that his aides attributed to a cold, and agonizingly froze up while trying to answer a question early in the forum.
“Every single person here … has made a mistake,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), a Biden campaign surrogate, told reporters Friday when asked about the president staring into space before delivering a non sequitur about his administration having “finally beat Medicare.”
More than eight in 10 Post readers said in a snap poll following the verbal slugfest that the president should drop out and not seek re-election.
But a senior White House adviser told CNN Friday morning that Biden was already preparing to return to the debate stage for another round with Trump, 78, in September, a statement the president backed up at an afternoon rally in North Carolina.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) was the first to shoot down discussions of replacing his party’s leader, while former leaders like Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) were only willing to admit that Biden “wasn’t great” and had a “bad night.”
Many House Democrats evaded reporters on Capitol Hill on Friday when asked about the president’s ability to serve another four-year term — or desire to even appear for a second debate against his Republican opponent.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said “it was wrong” for the Biden campaign to have even agreed to do the CNN debate, and he would advise against doing so again “with the same set of ground rules,” which didn’t allow for real-time fact-checking.
“There’s two schools of thought,” swing-district Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY) explained to The Post. “Some of them have immediately moved to the [Sen. John] Fetterman approach, which is, you know, this was just one bad night.”
“But I think most are engaging in the political equivalent of a drive-by shooting,” Molinaro said, referring to pundits and anonymous strategists who piled on Biden immediately after the debate and called on him to pull out of the race.
“I think President Biden showed he can’t fulfill another four-year term, clearly, but I think many thought that before last night’s debate,” he added. “Many Democrats and Republicans felt this for months.”
House Republicans are fighting with Attorney General Merrick Garland over audio recordings of an October 2023 special counsel interview with Biden, part of an investigation which found that he “willfully” hoarded classified documents after his vice presidency.
The House voted along party lines earlier this month to hold Garland in contempt for not releasing the audio tapes, while still turning in transcripts of Biden’s sit-down with special counsel Robert Hur.
Hur ultimately chose not to charge Biden because, he wrote, a federal jury would likely view the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
“The president of the United States has told the attorney general not to turn over the tape,” Johnson said Friday. “After last night’s debate, I think we all understand very clearly why that is.”
“He will very likely sound exactly on that tape as he did on the stage last night,” Johnson explained, “and that’s embarrassing to the president.”
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