Why Not the 25th? Power, Incentives, and the Question Washington Won’t Ask
By Giovanni Losito : OndaNova Medis
Washington has an emergency brake built into the Constitution.
It’s called the 25th Amendment, and it exists for one reason: when a presidency reaches a point where governing itself becomes the crisis.
In theory, the mechanism is straightforward. The vice president and a majority of the Cabinet can declare the president unable to discharge the duties of the office, transferring power to the vice president as acting president.
In practice, it is almost never touched.
Not during scandals.
Not during collapsing approval numbers.
Not during moments when the presidency itself becomes the center of national instability.
And that raises a question Washington rarely asks out loud:
Because once you begin to examine that question closely, the answer stops being about one president — and starts revealing how power actually works in modern American government.
Why not the 25th?
Washington runs on scandal cycles.
A revelation breaks, outrage follows, hearings are scheduled, and the political system absorbs the shock before moving on.
But sometimes the deeper question isn’t about the scandal itself. It’s about what the system refuses to do in response.
If a presidency becomes the center of controversy, declining public trust, and institutional strain, the Constitution provides a tool designed for precisely that moment: the 25th Amendment.
Yet in modern American politics, the amendment remains almost entirely theoretical.
That raises a question worth examining carefully: why does no governing coalition ever seriously approach the constitutional emergency brake?
To understand that reluctance, you have to look beyond the personalities involved and examine the incentives that surround presidential power.
The Emergency Brake That Rarely Gets Pulled
The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, created a formal process for addressing presidential incapacity.
Under Section 4, the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet can declare that the president is unable to discharge the duties of the office. The vice president then assumes the role of acting president.
But the process is far from simple.
The president can challenge that declaration. Congress can be forced to weigh in. And ultimately, keeping the vice president in charge requires two-thirds majorities in both chambers of Congress.
In other words, invoking the amendment would not be a quiet transition of authority. It would be a constitutional earthquake.
That reality alone explains why administrations avoid it. But it does not explain everything.
Because the modern presidency operates inside a much larger network of political, financial, and institutional power.
The Vice Presidency and the Long Game
There’s another constitutional wrinkle that rarely gets discussed.
If a vice president takes over after the president has already served two or more years of the term, that successor can still run for two full terms of their own.
In other words, the timing of a presidential handoff isn’t just procedural — it can shape the political future of whoever inherits the office.
No administration openly structures its decisions around that calculation.
But Washington is a place where everyone understands the math.
The Networks Behind Modern Power
The vice presidency today often represents more than a political partnership.
Vice President J.D. Vance entered national politics through a path that reflects a broader shift in American power structures.
Raised in Middletown, Ohio, Vance served in the Marine Corps before attending Yale Law School. After graduating, he moved into venture capital and technology investment circles, eventually co-founding the investment firm Narya Capital.
His rise also placed him within the orbit of influential Silicon Valley investors, including billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel, whose ventures and investments have helped shape companies operating in data analytics, artificial intelligence, and defense technology.
Thiel has long been a controversial figure in political discussions about the relationship between technology and governance. In a widely cited essay published in 2009, he wrote that he had come to question whether “freedom and democracy are compatible.”
The remark continues to be debated in discussions about how technology, capital, and political power intersect in the twenty-first century.
None of that implies control over elected officials.
But it does illustrate how the modern executive branch increasingly sits at the crossroads of government authority, private technology infrastructure, and venture-capital influence.
Enforcement Power and the Expansion of Federal Capacity
Another dimension of executive power runs through federal enforcement agencies.
In early 2026, congressional oversight hearings examined the activities of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including controversial enforcement actions and internal training practices.
During those hearings, lawmakers questioned agency leadership about operational decisions and accountability standards.
Separately, a whistleblower — former ICE employee Ryan Schwank — raised concerns about training procedures and internal guidance that he alleged conflicted with Fourth Amendment protections.
Members of Congress referenced those allegations during oversight events and called for further investigation.
At the same time, procurement analysis based on federal contracting data has drawn attention to increased spending on enforcement equipment and tactical resources by agencies within the Department of Homeland Security.
Supporters argue the spending reflects operational demands tied to border security and immigration enforcement.
Critics argue it reflects a broader trend toward the militarization of domestic enforcement agencies.
The procurement data itself does not settle that debate. But it highlights how executive authority increasingly shapes the scale and scope of federal enforcement capacity.
The Epstein Files and the Persistence of Elite Networks
Another story intersecting with American politics involves the continued release of documents connected to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein’s criminal activities and the conviction of his associate Ghislaine Maxwell exposed a network of wealthy and influential individuals who had social or financial ties to Epstein over several decades.
Recent document releases and congressional inquiries have again drawn attention to those connections.
Among those facing renewed scrutiny is Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has acknowledged visiting Epstein’s Caribbean island in the past while denying any wrongdoing.
Being mentioned in Epstein-related documents does not imply criminal conduct. But the continuing flow of records has highlighted how elite social networks can intersect with political and financial power.
For investigators and journalists, the significance of the story lies less in any single individual than in the broader pattern it reveals: how influence networks operate at the highest levels of society.
Congress and the Limits of Oversight
Congress retains powerful investigative tools.
Lawmakers can subpoena witnesses, demand testimony, and compel the release of documents from executive agencies.
But when it comes to the 25th Amendment, Congress occupies a reactive role.
The amendment allows lawmakers to vote on presidential incapacity only after the vice president and Cabinet initiate the process.
That means the political pressure necessary to trigger the amendment must originate inside the administration itself.
Historically, that has proven extraordinarily unlikely.
Red String: The Questions the 25th Forces
Who inside the Cabinet would actually lose power by invoking the amendment?
What evidence would persuade two-thirds of Congress that a president cannot govern?
Who benefits politically if the presidency absorbs the majority of public controversy?
What policies move forward more easily during instability than during stability?
What incentives might encourage a vice president to delay assuming power?
Which oversight efforts are pursued aggressively — and which ones quietly fade away?
These questions do not rely on speculation.
They rely on examining incentives.
Why the Emergency Brake Stays Untouched
The absence of any serious move toward the 25th Amendment does not necessarily mean the presidency is functioning smoothly.
It may simply mean that those inside the system believe invoking the amendment would create a crisis even more destabilizing than the problems it would attempt to solve.
That calculation reflects a reality often overlooked in political debates.
Presidents do not govern alone.
They operate within networks that include political parties, congressional leaders, donors, contractors, and the federal agencies that carry out policy decisions.
Those networks rarely dismantle themselves voluntarily.
Closing
The Constitution was written with safeguards designed to stabilize the republic when leadership falters.
But safeguards only work when the people responsible for using them are willing to act.
The silence surrounding the 25th Amendment therefore tells us something important.
Either those closest to power believe the threshold for invoking it has not been met, or they believe pulling that constitutional emergency brake would trigger a crisis even greater than the one it is meant to prevent.
If history has taught us anything, it is that democratic institutions rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment.
They erode slowly — through incentives, hesitation, and the quiet decisions not to act.
Ultimately, the responsibility for maintaining those guardrails does not belong solely to the people inside government.
It belongs to the public that placed them there in the first place.