Which presidents have had parts of the 25th Amendment invoked and under what circumstances?

1. Succession and Section 1: automatic elevation when a president leaves office

Section 1 simply confirms that the vice president becomes president on the death, removal, or resignation of the president; its most consequential application in modern practice occurred when Richard Nixon resigned and Vice President Gerald Ford became president, a succession that the amendment clarified in constitutional terms ^{[1] [2]}.

2. Filling vice‑presidential vacancies under Section 2: two 1970s cases

Section 2—authorizing the president to nominate a vice president who takes office upon confirmation by both Houses—was invoked twice in the 1970s amid the Watergate-era upheaval: after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned then‑Vice President Gerald Ford was nominated and confirmed as vice president, and after Nixon’s resignation Ford (having become president) nominated Nelson Rockefeller to fill the resultant vacancy, producing two vice presidents who had not been elected to those offices by the public ^{[1] [4] [2]}.

3. Voluntary transfers under Section 3: brief, medical uses by presidents

Section 3, which permits a president to declare in writing that he is temporarily unable to perform his duties so that the vice president serves as Acting President, has been used for routine medical reasons; historians and official records count three uses: President Ronald Reagan’s 1985 transfer of power while under anesthesia for a procedure (a point on which Reagan publicly tried to deny or minimize the formal invocation, per conflicting accounts), and President George W. Bush’s two short transfers during colonoscopies in 2002 and 2007, each lasting a few hours while the vice president acted as president ^{[5] [6] [3] [2]}.

4. Section 4: the untested political removal mechanism and near‑invocations

Section 4, the amendment’s most dramatic provision allowing the vice president and a majority of principal officers to declare the president unable and thereby make the vice president Acting President unless Congress overturns that determination, has never successfully been used to remove or displace a sitting president; it surfaced prominently in political debate after the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack when Cabinet conversations and congressional leaders considered it as an alternative to impeachment in the case of President Donald Trump, but no formal transmission under Section 4 was ever made ^{[7] [8] [9]}.

5. What the pattern reveals: practical, procedural, and political constraints

The amendment’s actual track record shows that Sections 1 and 2 remedied clear administrative gaps around vacancies (used in the 1970s) and Section 3 is the practical tool for short medical incapacities, while Section 4’s high threshold, procedural ambiguity (no precise medical standard for “inability”), and enormous political cost have kept it dormant despite episodic calls for its use—an outcome underscored by legal scholars and official guides that stress the amendment’s flexibility but note its unresolved constitutional contours and the Supreme Court’s lack of definitive interpretation ^{[2] [8] [1] [10]}.

6. Competing narratives and hidden agendas around invocation

Political actors have repeatedly tried to reframe or weaponize the amendment—some citing genuine concern about fitness to govern, others pursuing partisan advantage—so public claims about attempted invocations require careful sourcing: contemporaneous reporting documented Cabinet-level discussion about Section 4 after January 6 and likewise showed members of Congress proposing resolutions calling on the vice president to convene a Section 4 process in later sessions, yet those efforts remained political pressure rather than completed constitutional actions ^{[7] [11]}; historians also note presidential caution around creating precedent—Reagan’s public disclaimers about Section 3 illustrate how presidents may shape the record to avoid normalizing the amendment’s use ^[5].