Amid calls from former President Donald Trump and his allies asking President Joe Biden to step down over the Afghanistan crisis, Sen. Rick Scott, the chair of the Senate GOP campaign arm, has questioned whether Biden’s Cabinet should remove him from office.
The Florida Republican’s remarks come as the Taliban took control of Afghanistan and toppled the government after Biden’s decision to pull out American troops from the war-torn country.
Scott, who is widely seen as a potential 2024 presidential candidate tweeted: “We must confront a serious question: Is Joe Biden capable of discharging the duties of his office or has time come to exercise the provisions of the 25th Amendment?”
However, such removal is a near impossibility.
Credit: cnn.com
While the Biden administration has been widely criticized by Senate Republicans over how the withdrawal was managed, so far Scott is the only one to rake up the potential for invoking the 25th Amendment, which spells out the presidential order of succession.
The 25th Amendment has never been used in the U.S. and it allows the vice president and the majority of the president’s Cabinet to deem that the president is no longer fit for office. Such a decision would then have to be approved by Congress by a two-thirds vote in both chambers.
However, since Democrats have near full control of Washington and the vast majority of the Republicans have not yet called for Biden’s resignation, invoking the 25th Amendment over the Afghanistan issue seems very unrealistic.
Addressing the nation over the fall of Afghanistan, Biden on Monday resolutely defended his administration’s decision of troop withdrawal from the South Asian country. He, however, accepted that the manner in which the events (the Taliban taking over Afghanistan in just over a week) happened were faster than his administration had anticipated.