25, 72, 44, 6 and 24 - not your weekend lottery numbers
My wife has a not-so-secret crush on Dr. Sanjay Gupta. In late May, three and a half months prior to 72 yr old John McCain's shocking selection of his 44 yr old running mate, my wife caught a Dr. Gupta special on CNN called "The First Patient". The program explored in detail, presidential physical and mental health throughout history and the mechanism for substitute decision-making in this regard.
Interesting topic for a blog I thought to myself.
The 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution "deals with succession to the Presidency, and establishes procedures both for filling a vacancy in the office of the Vice President as well as responding to Presidential disabilities" (Wikipedia). This Amendment has only been invoked 6 times since its ratification (and two of these occasions actually involved application of a Section of the Amendment that allowed for the appointment of a Vice President during a Vice Presidential vacancy). Incredibly, the following occasions did not result in the invocation of the Amendement:
- Abraham Lincoln lying unconscious for several hours after he was shot until he died;
- James Garfield being incapacitated for eighty days by an assassin's bullet before dying;
- Woodrow Wilson suffering from a stroke which left him disabled for the last eighteen months of his term; and
- Dwight D. Eisenhower suffering from a heart attack in 1955 and a stroke in 1957.
Even after the assassination attempt by John Hinkley in 1981, then-President Ronald Reagan did not invoke the Amendment (although there was a heated debate about this amongst his aides).
As an aside, my wife tells me that the 25th Amendment has been invoked 3 times in the television series 24 in seasons 2, 4 and 6 (she's also a bit of a Kiefer fan).
David M. Smith
Not a neurosurgeon. Not Jack Bauer. But secure with myself anyhow.
