Washington: A US Senator has said that it was time to use constitutional powers to remove President Donald Trump from office if top officials thought he was unfit for the job.
“If senior administration officials think the President of the US is not able to do his job, then they should invoke the 25th Amendment,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren told CNN on Thursday.
“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 US. It’s time for them to do their job.”
The hard-charging comments by Warren, a potential 2020 Democrat presidential candidate, comes in the wake of a shocking New York Times opinion piece where an anonymous official raises deep concerns about Trump and contends that there were some initial conversations to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the President from office.
The White House has aggressively slammed the piece, calling the author a traitor and a coward.
Warrren dismissed questions that invoking constitutional remedies would provoke a constitutional crisis.
“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 told CNN.
“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.”
Warren, who is running for a second Senate term in Massachusetts this year, would not say when she would ultimately decide whether she will run for the White House.
“Right now I’m running for re-election in Massachusetts in 2018,” Warren said. “I’m taking nothing for granted.”
Warren is viewed as a likely presidential candidate against Trump, who rarely holds back when criticising Warren, derisively calling her “Pocahontas” because she had claimed a Native American heritage during her career as a law professor.
IANS