To continue my musings on presidential health, even when a president isn’t suffering from a deadly illness, they are still human and susceptible to everyday illnesses. After reading Lomazow and Fettmann’s1 account of the development of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which resolves several but not all issues of succession, I am curious about how such illnesses are handled.
The TV show West Wing is a great illustration of this.
In season 1, President Bartlett has two questionable health episodes. In the first one, he accidentally takes too much pain medicine one day and ends up loopy. When he shows up in the Oval Office thinking he’s fine, his staff point out that he is in no fit state to be working and send him back to the residence. In the second one, he gets the flu and has a high fever that requires an extended period of bed rest. Presumably, his mental capability were diminished at least during the peak of the fever.
However, it’s not until season 2 that anyone starts asking who was in charge while the president is out of it. In the season premiere, President Bartlett is put under anesthesia and one of the main issues that comes from this is that he didn’t sign a letter invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Lomazow and Fettmann explain that one of the provisions of the amendment allows the president to declare himself unfit for duty by submitting a letter to congress and then later reinstating himself by another letter declaring himself again fit for duty. They point out that “this has been used several times in recent decades, [by] presidents who undergo medical procedures involving anesthesia.” (220)
What happens when a president gets a fever and brain function diminishes as the body prioritizes other areas? Or gets COVID brain fog? Or takes too much pain medicine and is loopy? Does the Twenty-Fifth amendment ever get invoked so the President can have a sick day?
Sometimes our bodies just need a mental and physical break, even if we are President of the United States.
- Lomazow, Steven, MD, and Eric Fettmann. FDR’s Deadly Secret. Public Affairs; New York. 2009. ↩︎
Feature image credit: sick by Adam Schraff from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)
Carolyn Ristau 