Elizabeth Warren Is First Senator To Call For 25th Amendment Removal Of Donald Trump, Tells CNN Time Has Come

One day after the New York Times published a stunning op-ed piece by an anonymous “a senior official in the (Donald) Trump administration” revealing that “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has said that the time has come to start the process of removing Trump from office using the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

No other senator has yet called publicly for Trump to be removed through the consitutional process. The 25th Amendment allows a president’s cabinet, in emergency situations, to strip a president of his powers if he becomes physically or mentally unable to carry out the duties of the office, as Inquisitr explained last year. Congress ultimately must approve the removal of a president under the 25th Amendment, which would result in the vice president being elevated into the Oval Office.

The New York Times op-ed portrays Trump as “erratic,” saying, “meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions.”

In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Warren — whom Trump has derided as “Pocahontas,” as the Washington Post reports, due to her claimed Native American ancestry — said that Trump’s cabinet members should “do their job” and invoke the 25th Amendment.

“If senior administration officials think the President of the United States is not able to do his job, then they should invoke the 25th Amendment,” Warren said in the CNN interview. “The Constitution provides for a procedure whenever the Vice President and senior officials think the President can’t do his job. It does not provide that senior officials go around the President — take documents off his desk, write anonymous op-eds. Everyone of these officials have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. It’s time for them to do their job.”

In the Times op-ed, the “senior official” reveals that “given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis.”

Warren, however, said that beginning the process of removing Trump though the 25th Amendment would not cause such a crisis, according to The Hill.

“What kind of a crisis do we have if senior officials believe that the president can’t do his job and then refuse to follow the rules that have been laid down in the Constitution?” Warren said. “They can’t have it both ways. Either they think that the president is not capable of doing his job, in which case they follow the rules in the Constitution, or they feel that the president is capable of doing his job, in which case they follow what the President tells them to do.”