Have any U.S. presidents ever been the subject of a Section 4 declaration or attempted declaration?
Executive summary
No sitting U.S. president has been the subject of a Section 4 declaration under the Twenty‑Fifth Amendment according to the reporting reviewed; the Constitution’s Section 4 procedure exists to let the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet (or another body Congress prescribes) declare a president “unable,” but the reviewed sources document the mechanism and scholarly debate about it without identifying any instance in which it was invoked against a president [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. What Section 4 is and why it matters
Section 4 of the Twenty‑Fifth Amendment creates a formal process by which the vice president together with a majority of principal officers of the executive departments—or a body Congress might establish—can transmit a written declaration to the congressional leaders that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties” of the office, at which point the vice president immediately assumes the role of Acting President until the dispute is resolved by Congress [3] [1].
2. How scholars and official guides describe the procedure
Legal commentaries and institutional guides emphasize that Section 4 is designed as a last‑resort safety valve for situations in which a president cannot or will not invoke Section 3 himself, and they analyze the procedural complexities and political risks of using it—such as who counts as “principal officers,” what standards of incapacity apply, and the congressional two‑thirds threshold for upholding a continuing transfer of power [2] [4].
3. Historical practice: what the sources say (and do not say)
The sources reviewed chart the amendment’s text, ratification history, and the limited use of related provisions—Section 3 has been used when presidents voluntarily transferred power—but none of the cited institutional or scholarly sources identifies a recorded instance in which Section 4 was formally invoked to declare a sitting president unable or in which an attempted declaration reached transmission to Congress [1] [2] [3] [4].
4. Voluntary transfers vs. involuntary declarations
The record described in these materials distinguishes Section 3, the president’s own written transfer of power (a mechanism used in historical practice and cited as precedent in guidance), from Section 4, which contemplates a non‑voluntary transfer initiated by the vice president and Cabinet; the sources note Section 3’s use as precedent but treat Section 4 as untested in actual forcible transfers [4] [2].
5. Ambiguities, debate, and why no invocation matters politically
Commentators and law‑review authors highlight that Section 4’s ambiguity—over medical standards, political motivations, and institutional trust—makes its use fraught, which helps explain why the mechanism has been theorized and litigated in scholarship but not apparently deployed in practice according to the documents reviewed; such restraint reflects both legal uncertainty and the high political stakes of removing a president without impeachment [2] [3].
6. Limits of the available reporting and transparency about gaps
The sources examined provide the constitutional text, scholarly interpretation, and historical context for the Twenty‑Fifth Amendment but do not offer a comprehensive catalogue of every executive era event; therefore, while these materials do not document any Section 4 invocation or attempted invocation against a U.S. president, that factual assertion is limited to what these sources explicitly report and does not purport to be an exhaustive archival search beyond them [1] [2] [3] [4].