Pointing to the outcry over President Donald Trump’s latest controversial tweets, freshman Rep. Jamie Raskin is urging his colleagues to get behind a bill that could potentially oust the President if he was mentally or physically unfit.
The Maryland Democrat wants to create an 11-member commission made up of mostly physicians and psychiatrists — more formally called the “Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity.” The panel would carry out a medical examination and determine whether the President was physically or mentally able to do the job.
Two of the commission’s members would also be former high ranking officials, such as presidents, vice presidents, attorneys general or secretaries of state.
It’s a provocative and long-shot effort, but Raskin is citing as his legal backup the 25th Amendment of the Constitution, which was adopted in 1967 after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to establish procedure in the case a president is incapacitated.
So let me get this straight. Donald Trump is “incapacitated” for the same reason a mortally wounded president would be incapacitated, kind of like John F. Kennedy had he survived the shot to his brain for a few days or weeks after the attempt.
That’s what passes for rationality and objectivity in today’s Washington D.C. And they wonder why so many of us call it “the swamp”.
If you’re horrified by President Trump’s tweets, then consider the prospect of a politically appointed, overwhelmingly politically and ideologically biased mental health professional deciding who the President of the United States will or will not be.
Speaking as someone who has known and worked with a lot of psychiatrists over the years, I can promise you that you will not be getting a rational perspective. First of all, it would be nearly impossible to find any mental health professional who isn’t a die-hard Democrat to the left of Hillary Clinton, if anything.
Secondly, the only legitimate basis for finding a president mentally unfit would be evidence of hallucinations and/or delusions, the necessary components of any psychosis. Delusions, in the mental health context, do not refer to having political opinions or personal styles on social media that differ from your own. In D.C., Democrats think Republicans are crazy and vice-versa, merely for holding the views they do. But that’s not how you define a delusion. Delusions refer to self-evident, easily and immediately refutable false beliefs, such as the belief that people are talking to you personally through your television or computer screen, or that others who neither know you nor care about you are plotting your destruction. Delusions are proven wrong not through politics, but through reason, logic, facts and evidence.
The prospect of politically appointed and thoroughly biased psychiatrists sitting in judgment of whether Donald Trump or anyone else is fit to be President serves as a far more threatening prospect to our faltering republic than anything Mr. Trump might ever write in a Tweet.
Looking at this whole situation objectively, from a distance, does not lead one to conclude that we have a President who’s insane and therefore cannot hold office. Rather, we have a situation where people who think that those who differ with them on matters related to taxes, environmentalist regulation, gun ownership and how to best fight Islamic terrorism are self-evidently insane and therefore deserve to be removed from office. That’s a precedent from which no republic will ever recover, once we go down that road.
Before you get all hot and bothered by Donald Trump’s social media habits, consider the prospect of one political party being permitted to use the pseudo-scientific version of “psychiatry” to eradicate policy positions they were unsuccessful at motivating the majority of the electorate to reject on Election Day. Try to remember that under dictatorships like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, the government uses psychiatric hacks to condemn political dissidents under the pretense of insanity all the time.
If it’s possible for Democrats to derail or end Donald Trump’s presidency merely because they think his positions are crazy, then the same works in reverse. At that point, you’re left with nothing but all-out civil war. Is that what Democrats want? Evidently so.
The true insanity is the compulsive mindlessness exhibited by Democrats mad for power since losing it in last November’s election. The American republic has indeed gone insane. But it’s not because of Donald Trump.
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