A loophole in the 25th Amendment lets 14 people remove a sitting President from office It would only take Vice President Mike Pence and 13 of President Donald Trump's 24 Cabinet members to depose him - Business Insider UK

A loophole in the 25th Amendment lets 14 people remove a sitting President from office

It would only take Vice President Mike Pence and 13 of President Donald Trump's 24 Cabinet members to depose him

Rebecca Harrington Business Insider 2 days ago6 comments

Americans have been brushing up on their knowledge of the Constitution lately, according to Google Trends data.

The search term “25th Amendment” spiked in popularity after President Donald Trump took office, particularly after he signed the first controversial temporary travel ban on January 27.

After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Congress proposed and the states ratified the 25th Amendment in 1967 to formally outline the transition of power. Before that, the vice president didn't officially have the power to take over.

The amendment states that if the president dies, resigns, or is removed from office, the vice president becomes president. If there is a vacancy in the vice presidency for any reason, the president can choose someone to fill it. And if the president is unable to fulfill his duties — like when President George W. Bush was under general anaesthesia for colonoscopies in 2002 and 2007 — he can temporarily transfer his powers to the vice president, and get them back when he's done.

But Section IV is what some liberals have been frantically searching for more information on, because it could be a way to legally remove Trump from office.

A legal loophole

Under the amendment's fourth stipulation, it would only take 14 people to depose the president — Vice President Mike Pence and 13 of Trump's 24 Cabinet members.

Section IV reads:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

John D. Feerick, former dean of Fordham Law School, is one of the chief architects of the 25th Amendment who shepherded it through Congress in the early 1960s.

He told Business Insider that the senators who signed the provision into law specified that declaring the president unfit must rely on “reliable facts regarding the president's physical or mental faculties,” not personal prejudice.

“If you read the debates, it's also clear that policy and political differences are not included, unpopularity is not included, poor judgment, incompetence, laziness, or impeachable conduct — none of that, you'll find in the debates in the congressional record, is intended to be covered by Section IV,” Feerick said.

Section IV goes on to say that if two-thirds of both houses of Congress don't vote to uphold the decision and keep the vice president in charge within 21 days, then the powers and duties automatically transfer back to the president. So if the president doesn't want to give up his office, Feerick explained, he doesn't have to if Congress agrees he shouldn't.

Akhil Reed Amar, a law and political science professor at Yale University, said in a podcast for the National Constitution Center on the topic that the president's own running mate is the one who triggers a “palace coup,” in order to maintain political stability.

“The 25th Amendment doesn’t try to specify in great detail what might count as a disability, but does try to in effect identify who and how we go about the process,” Amar said. “Here's the key point: The vice president is the pivot in the whole process. Unless the vice president puts himself — maybe one day, herself — forward, no one else can really basically, at least within the 25th Amendment framework, proclaim an unwilling president 'disabled.'”

The idea is that the Cabinet and VP are the president's closest advisers, Feerick said, so they would be the ones with the best sense of his mental faculties. They, and Congress, could also consult doctors to evaluate the president's physical and mental health in order to determine if he or she is fit for the job.

The 25th Amendment is a separate process from impeachment, which allows Congress to remove a sitting president if a majority of the House of Representatives votes that he has committed treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, and a trial in the Senate convicts him.

Feerick, who didn't discuss applying Section IV to Trump, said he hopes this renewed interest in the Constitution will encourage Congress to consider filling some of the legal gaps in the amendment that he and other legal scholars have proposed over the years. For example, the Constitution doesn't outline what happens if the vice president is unable to serve, and he and other experts agree that the order of succession shouldn't include members of Congress as it does today.

“It's important that people be educated about the Constitution. It's our greatest charter of liberty,” Feerick said. “I'm really happy that there's greater education going on — I'm obviously not happy about all the division in the country — but I'm happy that at least there's greater education being provided about the amendment.”

Read the original article on Business Insider UK. © 2017. Follow Business Insider UK on Twitter.

North Korea Renews Guam Threat Ahead of Joint Naval Exercise - New York Times

North Korea Renews Guam Threat Ahead of Joint Naval Exercise

By CHOE SANG-HUNOCT. 13, 2017

SEOUL, South Korea — As the United States and South Korea prepare for next week’s joint naval exercise, North Korean officials on Friday renewed their threat to launch ballistic missiles near Guam, an American territory in the western Pacific.

The drill, which involves the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, is scheduled to begin on Monday in waters east and west of South Korea. The 10-day exercise will check the allies’ “communications, interoperability and partnership,” the United States Navy’s 7th Fleet said in a statement.

The nuclear-powered submarine Michigan arrived at the South Korean port of Busan on Friday. American and South Korean warplanes will also join the exercise, which takes place during heightened tensions over North Korea’s advancing nuclear missile program.

In recent months, President Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, have amplified their countries’ military standoff by exchanging bellicose statements and personal insults.

Although both South Korea and the United States insist next week’s drill is defensive in nature, North Korea considers such war games rehearsals for invasion.

It remains unclear whether North Korea will lash out with a weapons test during the exercise, as it often has in the past.

On Friday, a researcher at the Institute for American Studies at the North Korean Foreign Ministry warned that the joint exercise, as well as a flight by two American B-1B bombers over South Korea on Tuesday, would compel the North to “take military counteraction.”

The researcher, Kim Kwang-hak, did not elaborate but recalled North Korea’s warning in August that it could launch missiles near Guam, home to the United States air base from which the B-1B long-range bombers took off on Tuesday. Kim Jong-un has said he would watch the Americans before deciding when to launch an “enveloping fire” around Guam.

“We have already warned several times that we will take counteractions for self-defense, including a salvo of missiles into waters near the U.S. territory of Guam,” Mr. Kim, the North Korean researcher, told the North’s official Korean Central News Agency on Friday. “The U.S. military action hardens our determination that the U.S. should be tamed with fire and lets us take our hand closer to the ‘trigger’ for taking the toughest countermeasure.”

North Korea has made similar threats against the United States for decades. But Mr. Trump has added to tensions in recent weeks by employing similarly tough talk, threatening to “totally destroy” or rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea. He has said Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson was “wasting his time” trying to negotiate with North Korea.

Despite Mr. Trump’s words, John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, said on Thursday that North Korea’s nuclear threat was “manageable” for now.

Mr. Kelly added that Americans should be concerned that the North is getting closer to being able to hit the mainland United States with its missiles. He said there was already “great concern” about Americans living in Guam.

Also on Friday, South Korea’s meteorological authorities said that they detected a small quake near the North’s underground nuclear test site, but that it was not caused by a man-made explosion. They have detected three similar tremors from near the test site since the North’s nuclear test on Sept. 3, in which North Korea said it detonated a hydrogen bomb.

Some earthquake experts have attributed the recent tremors to underground cave-ins caused by that powerful test. Commercial satellite images have also found evidence of landslides near the North Korean site, raising fears of radioactive fallout if the North conducts another nuclear test there.

The previous test compelled Washington to accelerate its global campaign to exert economic pressure on North Korea.

On Thursday, the United Arab Emirates said it would stop issuing new visas to North Korean workers. Kuwait and Qatar have taken similar steps in recent weeks. Several thousand North Korean workers have been working at Middle East construction sites, earning badly needed cash for their government.

Is Xi a Threat to Foreign Businesses in China? - Bloomberg

Is Xi a Threat to Foreign Businesses in China?

Multinationals say they feel less welcome in the world’s second-biggest economy.

Peter Martin and Keith Zhai

On Oct. 18, 2,300 hand-picked delegates from China’s ministries, provinces, the military, and state-owned and private companies will file into Beijing’s Great Hall of the People for the start of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party. The weeklong event is a highly choreographed, twice-in-a decade shuffling of China’s political deck. More than half of the top leadership is likely to be replaced, including as many as five of the seven members of the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee—a subject of furious speculation in the runup to the Congress. What’s already a foregone conclusion is that President Xi Jinping will go on to serve a second five-year term and will in all likelihood emerge from the ritual even more powerful than he already is.

Foreign businesses may not find this an appealing prospect. It’s true China’s president talks a great deal about openness. One of his first acts in office was to reenact Deng Xiaoping’s “Southern Tour,” which reignited market reforms in the early 1990s. Policies announced at the Third Plenum in 2013 promised a “decisive” role for market forces. And while his U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, has disparaged globalists, Xi embraces the label. In a speech at this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said choosing protectionism was akin to “locking yourself in a dark room.”

But Xi’s rhetoric doesn’t square with reality, multinationals say. In a January survey of 462 U.S. companies by the American Chamber of Commerce in China, 81 percent said they felt less welcome in China, while more than 60 percent have little or no confidence the country will further open its markets in the next three years. The sentiment is echoed by the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, Mats Harborn, who says his members are suffering from “promise fatigue.” Says Harborn: “As business and investment decisions can’t be based on promises, we now need to see encouraging words turned into concrete market-opening actions.”

Indeed, despite all of Xi’s talk of reform, China still ranks 59th out of the 62 countries evaluated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of openness to foreign direct investment. At the same time, FDI is becoming less important to the economy: In 2016 it accounted for a little more than 1 percent of China’s gross domestic product, down from around 2.3 percent in 2006 and 4.8 percent in 1996.

“The Chinese leadership as a whole … has been conscious about pacing reform and opening”

During Xi’s first years in office, several foreign companies became targets of his anticorruption campaign as well as stepped-up enforcement of antitrust laws. Makers of baby formula including Abbott Laboratories, Danone, and Mead Johnson Nutrition were hit with a collective $110 million in fines in 2013 for allegedly colluding to keep prices high. An investigation into British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline Plc for “serious economic crimes” including bribery culminated in an almost $500 million fine in September 2014. (In a statement at the time the company said it would pay the penalty and make changes to its business practices to remedy flaws cited by Chinese authorities.)

An even bigger cause for concern for multinationals are Beijing’s plans to replicate foreign technologies and foster national champions that can take them global. A program launched in 2015 called Made in China 2025 aims to make the country competitive within a decade in 10 industries, including aircraft, new energy vehicles, and biotechnology. U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has described the plan as an “attack” on “American genius.”

During a trip to China last month, Ross zeroed in on Beijing’s efforts to boost the share of domestically made robots in China to more than 50 percent of total sales by 2020, from 31 percent last year. To reach that target, the government is offering subsidies, low-interest loans, tax waivers, and rent-free land to makers of robots as well as businesses that buy them. Chinese companies such as E-Deodar Robot Equipment, Siasun Robot & Automation, and Anhui Efort Intelligent Equipment aspire to become multinationals, challenging the likes of Switzerland’s ABB Robotics and Japan’s Fanuc for leadership in the $11 billion market.

How Xi Jinping Went From Feeding Pigs to Ruling China

How Xi Jinping Went From Feeding Pigs to Ruling China

Under Xi, China has also redoubled efforts to build its own semiconductor industry. The country buys about 59 percent of the chips sold around the world, but in-country manufacturers account for only 16.2 percent of the industry’s global sales revenue, according to PwC. To rectify that, Made in China 2025 earmarks $150 billion in spending over 10 years. A January 2017 report by the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology detailed China’s extensive subsidies to its chipmakers, mandates for domestic companies to buy only from local suppliers, and requirements that American companies transfer technology to China in return for access to its market, all of which add up to a natural security threat, it said. “It has been official Chinese policy for decades to seek the transfer of foreign technology, to establish domestic champions and to eventually displace foreign competitors,” says Jeff Moon, who stepped down as assistant U.S. trade representative for China affairs in January. “Xi has injected more nationalism and more vigor into those long-standing efforts and taken them to a more sophisticated level.”

Xi’s policies tread a well-worn path laid down by his predecessors. In the mid-2000s, the country set its sights on developing large, advanced nuclear reactors. State-owned enterprises including China General Nuclear Power Corp. and China National Nuclear Corp. assimilated Western technologies—sometimes with cooperation and sometimes not—and are now engaged in projects in Argentina, Kenya, Pakistan, and the U.K. Westinghouse Electric Co. supplied more than 75,000 documents detailing its nuclear technology to China’s State Nuclear Power Technology Co. in 2010 as part of a bid to build four reactors. In 2014 the U.S. government charged five Chinese military officials with hacking American companies including Westinghouse to steal information that would give their Chinese competitors an edge.

Some China hands say Xi hasn’t been more friendly to foreign business because he spent most of his first term focused on politics. In China, presidents are anointed, not elected. Deprived of a popular mandate, they must solidify their hold over the apparatus of power to advance their agenda. The anticorruption campaign Xi unleashed after coming to power in 2012 has ensnared some 1 million officials and sidelined many of his would-be rivals. He’s also overseen the largest overhaul of the military since the 1950s, decommissioning some 300,000 troops. “Usually when people come into office, nothing happens in the first year or two,” says Sidney Rittenberg, an American journalist who joined Mao Zedong’s revolution and for years served as his translator. “This guy came out of his corner like a boxer with a fury of punches.” Rittenberg says Xi has “still got to break the resistance to big economic reforms,” including restructuring or shutting down the 98 remaining state-owned enterprises operated by the central government. “They haven’t made much headway in terms of that at all.”

John Thornton, who helped build Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s business in China in the 1990s and is now executive chairman of Barrick Gold Corp., says China’s policymakers have long worried that liberalizing too quickly might open the economy to foreign domination. “For the last 20 years, maybe even longer, the Chinese leadership as a whole, and this would include the current leadership, has been conscious about pacing reform and opening,” he says. What’s changed is that while U.S. policymakers were once comfortable allowing China that rein, today they’re more inclined to push back, Thornton says.

Sensing jitters, China’s leadership has tried to reassure foreign companies. In January, Xi’s cabinet released a policy known as “Document No. 5” that promises to expand access to the service, manufacturing, and mining sectors. The government has also said it’s considering easing restrictions in the civil aviation industry. Changes to regulations governing the insurance and auto industries, where caps on foreign ownership make joint ventures a necessity, may also be in the works.

Nevertheless, multinationals would do well to temper their expectations, says Gao Zhikai, who was an investment banker with Morgan Stanley and its joint venture China International Capital Corp. In the 1990s, China relied on foreign businesses not only for investment, but also technical and management know-how. Today, “foreign companies are less attractive to China, because they don’t have many things that China doesn’t have,” says Gao, who was involved in some landmark reforms, including taking China Mobile Ltd. public in 1997. “China is one of the world’s largest countries looking at population size, Internet users, mobile phone users, and other aspects,” he says. “It is now the time for China to lead global trends.” —With Danielle Bochove

How Xi Jinping Went From Feeding Pigs to Ruling China

BOTTOM LINE - Chinese President Xi’s quest to create national champions in industries such as semiconductors and robotics presents a clear threat to Western companies.

Trump's 'new' Iran policy and the difficulties ahead - BBC News

Trump's 'new' Iran policy and the difficulties ahead

By Jonathan Marcus

Defence and diplomatic correspondentIn setting out his new Iran policy, President Trump painted a stark picture of Iran as a brutal and manichean power, driven by a revolutionary ideology and eager to confront the US and its allies at almost every turn.

In contrast to what he clearly sees as the lax approach of the Obama administration, Mr Trump wants to double-down on Iran - enforcing the nuclear deal more effectively and countering its growing regional influence.

But beyond the tough rhetoric intended to please his own political base, what actually is new about Trump's new Iran policy? To what extent is it a departure from the Obama years? And what might its likely consequences be?

Given Mr Trump's vehement opposition to the Iran nuclear deal - the JCPOA as it is known - it is surprising that, for now at least, the US is not walking away from the agreement. The president could so easily have restored nuclear-related sanctions without having recourse to Capitol Hill.

Instead he has placed the fate of the nuclear agreement in the hands of Congress.

He is clearly seeking - and key Congressional leaders are already working on - amendments to US law that would automatically restore sanctions if Iran took specific actions known as trigger points. There is even a strong suggestion that he wants Congress to make the expiry of certain restrictions under the agreement - the so-called sunset clauses - irrelevant by again using trigger points to automatically restore sanctions should Iran re-start activities once the JCPOA restrictions have been lifted.

Full story: Trump vows not to recertify agreement

Iran nuclear deal: Key details

Europe ‘concerned’ by Trump Iran threat

What do Trump's words on Iran mean for US/UK relations?

What if anything may be agreed in terms of US legislation is a future story. But just how extraordinary such a step would be needs to be noted now. The US would effectively be using its domestic law to try to re-write a multilateral agreement. There could be diplomatic difficulties ahead. It could create a potential rift between the US and its allies, and further tensions between Washington on the one hand, and Moscow and Beijing on the other.

It also raises questions about how far a US administration's word can be trusted when it concludes an international agreement. What sort of signal does it send to a country like North Korea that is being encouraged to return to the negotiating table by Mr Trump's own secretary of state?

Mr Trump painted a bleak picture of the nuclear deal's value, asserting at one point that it was enacted, and nuclear-related sanctions were lifted, "just before what would have been the total collapse of the Iranian regime". Few will recognise this situation as reality. Instead the deal was negotiated at a time when there was a very real possibility of a war between Israel, and possibly the US, on one side and Iran on the other. The nuclear deal averted this and placed constraints on Iran's nuclear activities.

Certainly Mr Trump was fair to cite the agreements shortcomings. Ballistic missiles were not covered and Iran's missile programme continues apace. Many of the agreement's restrictions will indeed expire in time. Several countries hoped to address some of these problems at a later date but it is far from clear that this moment should be now.

Mr Trump cited violations of the agreement by Iran but failed to mention that when concerns have been raised under the JCPOA's dispute mechanisms Iran has pulled back on its questionable actions.

The decision to keep the nuclear deal in place for the time being raises a question over whether Mr Trump is creating an opportunity to strengthen the deal or weakening it.

Of course, nuclear matters are only one of the problems between the US and Iran. Many of the advocates of the nuclear deal would agree with Mr Trump about Iran's wider activities in the region.

Mr Trump speaks as though the Obama administration had not sought to impose sanctions against Iran for a variety of misbehaviours - support for terrorism, infringement of its own people's human rights and so on. He says that sanctions will be stepped up, especially against Iran's ideological and military elite, the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). But the newness of the Trump policy seems to be a matter of rhetoric and degree, rather than substance.

Mr Trump seeks to make an explicit link between what he sees as the failing nuclear deal's relaxation of restrictions on Tehran and its wider activities in the region. It certainly has more money at its disposal. And here too he has a point.

Just before Mr Trump's speech a former state department official, Jon B. Alterman - now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies - explained to me the previous administration's thinking: "They focused on what they saw as the most strategically threatening piece, the nuclear one. This is in part because they had other tools to deal with other aspects of Iranian behaviour, and in part because they thought that a gradual opening to Iran would empower domestic constituencies there that wanted Iran to act like a more normal state in the region."

That didn't really happen. Some would argue that Iran does indeed have a more moderate government today, in part due to the economic benefits of the nuclear deal. But few would say that the hard-line elements of the IRGC have significantly moderated their behaviour abroad.

And this brings me to a more fundamental issue, the changing role of Iran in the region. The US inadvertently set this process in motion by removing Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, which had always been a strategic counter-weight to Tehran. Since then, Iran has taken every advantage of the chaos in the region to further its own ends. Was this all malign intent on the part of Tehran or simply the furtherance of its strategic goals? Where is the line to be drawn?

This matters, because the region is now entering a critical and even more dangerous phase. With the so-called Islamic State close to defeat, a battle is under way in Iraq and Syria for a distribution of the spoils. In Iraq, Iran has significant influence over the Shia-dominated government and many militia forces loyal to its point of view. In Syria, it is among the chief backers of the Assad regime, which puts it and its proxies in direct opposition to US-backed groups. Is this really the time to be provoking even greater tension between Washington and Tehran? Or is it a moment to combine firmness with at least the opportunity of dialogue?

Diplomacy - in the much over-used phrase - is the art of the possible. The nuclear deal, with all its imperfections, was the only one that was possible at the time.

The deal limps on, perhaps weakened but not yet fundamentally undermined. The parameters of Mr Trump's wider effort to contain Iran are yet to be spelt out in detail. His speech represents above all an uneasy compromise between the views of the president and those of his most senior officials and military advisers - all of whom want to see a tougher stance towards Tehran, but who, equally - to a man - have backed the nuclear accord despite all its imperfections.