Estate Planning

25, 72, 44, 6 and 24 - not your weekend lottery numbers

By Hull & Hull LLP

My wife has a not-so-secret crush on Dr. Sanjay Gupta.  In late May, three and a half months prior to 72 yr old John McCain's shocking selection of his 44 yr old running mate, my wife caught a Dr. Gupta special on CNN called "The First Patient".  The program explored in detail, presidential physical and mental health throughout history and the mechanism for substitute decision-making in this regard.

Interesting topic for a blog I thought to myself.

The 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution "deals with succession to the Presidency, and establishes procedures both for filling a vacancy in the office of the Vice President as well as responding to Presidential disabilities" (Wikipedia).  This Amendment has only been invoked 6 times since its ratification (and two of these occasions actually involved application of a Section of the Amendment that allowed for the appointment of a Vice President during a Vice Presidential vacancy).  Incredibly, the following occasions did not result in the invocation of the Amendement:

• Abraham Lincoln lying unconscious for several hours after he was shot until he died;
• James Garfield being incapacitated for eighty days by an assassin's bullet before dying;
• Woodrow Wilson suffering from a stroke which left him disabled for the last eighteen months of his term; and
• Dwight D. Eisenhower suffering from a heart attack in 1955 and a stroke in 1957.

Even after the assassination attempt by John Hinkley in 1981, then-President Ronald Reagan did not invoke the Amendment (although there was a heated debate about this amongst his aides).

As an aside, my wife tells me that the 25th Amendment has been invoked 3 times in the television series 24 in seasons 2, 4 and 6 (she's also a bit of a Kiefer fan).

David M. Smith

Not a neurosurgeon. Not Jack Bauer. But secure with myself anyhow.

Full post as published by Toronto Estate Law Blog on September 08, 2008 (boomark / email).