WI Reagan removed from office via 25th, 1987?

Going on the Ron Reagan thread from Chat, let's say that Baker determines that Reagan is cognitively deficient. What happens next? A conference with the Cabinet and Bush? Does Reagan resist?
 
Why would they bother? His term is nearly over, the executive branch is running smoothly, and he hasn't done anything really crazy. Unless he starts actually being dangerous ("My fellow Americans, we're going to bomb the Soviets today, for real this time!"), I can't see them really invoking the Succession Act...
 
I imagine it would have a negative impact for the Republicans, possibly enough to keep GHWB from winning the '88 election, if the Democrats play their cards right.
 

gridlocked

Banned
Yes, Baker would do it. If Reagan 'woke up' and resisted, then almost by definition he would not be removed. Baker is not out to take down Reagan, but to fix a problem.

This would help Bush since he becomes the incumbent, but tarnish the Reagan brand. I assume the cover would be getting Reagan to resign for health reasons relating to the assassination attempt rather than Baker putting him on trial in front of a national TV audience for mental incompetence. If Reagan was so far gone that they had to make it public, then Baker would grease the skids and the removal of Reagan would happen very quickly.
 
Yes, Baker would do it. If Reagan 'woke up' and resisted, then almost by definition he would not be removed. Baker is not out to take down Reagan, but to fix a problem.

This would help Bush since he becomes the incumbent, but tarnish the Reagan brand. I assume the cover would be getting Reagan to resign for health reasons relating to the assassination attempt rather than Baker putting him on trial in front of a national TV audience for mental incompetence. If Reagan was so far gone that they had to make it public, then Baker would grease the skids and the removal of Reagan would happen very quickly.

This. I could see Baker or somebody else in the White House purposefully leaking the possibility that Reagan is starting to feel the effects of the Hinckley assassination attempt ahead of time, so that it doesn't become a shock when Reagan does resign or gets forced out.

If it's executed smoothly, it could boost Bush's chances of election in 1988 significantly, if for nothing more than being the incumbent president and that he could ride some sympathy for Reagan's ill health into votes. If it's not executed correctly (or if Reagan refuses to leave), it could fracture the GOP for a couple election cycles including losing the White House in 1988, and cause a rift between the moderate and conservative factions in the GOP that would become a major problem for the GOP down the line.
 
In 1987? Why bother? If Reagan is starting to stumble mentally, his staff will cover for him. You have to remember that among conservatives and the GOP leadership at the time, Reagan's image was practically godlike. There was serious, serious talk of carving his profile into Mount Rushmore. The image would not be allowed to crumble in the last months of the Administration.

So the staff closes ranks around him, his few public appearances are carefully managed and choreographed, Bush and Baker take over much of the day to day decision making, and Nancy fills in for him at social functions. "Oh no, there's nothing wrong. Ronnie just has so much work to do to prepare for next week..." As the months wind down, a few rumors are carefully planted about how the toll of the presidency and his wounds have tired him out, he has reduced his workload at the White House in favor of his anointed successor, Bush, and he's looking forward to a very quiet retirement.
 
The damage he had done to the country was allready done. Depending on how Baker and company handle it. I still see Daddy Bush getting elected in 88. I am sure the the neo cons would hide the fact that Reagan had went over the edge. I would not doubt that was what really happened. But there is no way the in accurate opinion of Reagan being a great President would be allowed to die. The whole way of life of the neo cons is tied up in that fairy tale.
 

loughery111

Banned
The damage he had done to the country was allready done. Depending on how Baker and company handle it. I still see Daddy Bush getting elected in 88. I am sure the the neo cons would hide the fact that Reagan had went over the edge. I would not doubt that was what really happened. But there is no way the in accurate opinion of Reagan being a great President would be allowed to die. The whole way of life of the neo cons is tied up in that fairy tale.

Let the flamewars begin.

Look, bud... up until this point everyone was attempting to keep the threat mostly apolitical, insofar as a political POD can be kept in such a state. Make your way over to the chat thread on the same topic if you wanna do this, 'cause I want to see this discussion's conclusion...
 
I don't see 1988 being affected that much, certainly not the final outcome. Unless you kill Atwater or nominate someone other than Dukakis I don't the OTL results being changed that much. If Baker undertakes his assessment and invokes it before the 20th (highly unlikely) then Bush is ineligible in 1992, if not then he is.
 
Several of the physicians that were very well aware of Reagan's health during his presidency have officially recorded that no signs of Alzheimer Syndrome were noticeable during his term of office. The first such symptoms exhibited a year or two later. I suspect that Ron Reagan is shopping a book deal for the 100th birthday remembrance. It will be interesting to see what Michael Reagan's response will be
 

gridlocked

Banned
What makes any diagnosis hard is Reagan's style. He was friendly, but distant both in his personal life and as an executive. He would always stick to the same core principles or his stable of favorite jokes when he was unscripted.

When he was elected in 1980, when he was clearly not impaired, his opponents dismissed him as a simple minded fool (who then proceeded to have the most successful presidency of the second half of the 20th Century).

So if he acts like a simple minded fool, how would his detractors notice a difference? If he forgets something, won't any supporter simply say he is a little tired because while still being fully functional he is getting on in years and the Presidency is a tough job so we should cut him a little slack?

The only one to know for sure would be Nancy Reagan and if she says Reagan was fine - none of Reagan's opponents would believe her and she would never say he was impaired as President since that would damage his legacy.

In short how could anybody in the 80s figure out if he has Alzheimer or not? My gut says he did not have it yet, but he always made few public appearances compared to an Obama for example, so how could one really tell? Now Bill Clinton had a very different style so you would know if something was wrong in a heartbeat.
 
Why would they bother? His term is nearly over, the executive branch is running smoothly, and he hasn't done anything really crazy. Unless he starts actually being dangerous ("My fellow Americans, we're going to bomb the Soviets today, for real this time!"), I can't see them really invoking the Succession Act...

Really?

Right around this time, just after the midterms of 1986, is when the Iran/Contra scandals began breaking big-time. The stuff we were learning about and the Administration's reaction to it was all pretty scandalizing.

Clearly, one approach to "spin control" might have been to bundle as much of the outrageous stuff together into an alleged out-of-control faction, blame the existence of that faction on the poor Gipper's mental state, and put the President out to pasture. He could conveniently pardon key players just before retiring so they are immune to prosecution, which is sort of what happened OTL--they were blanket-pardoned by Bush.

One reason this did not happen OTL was that the Reagan and Bush administrations wanted to go right on with the same policies; trying to clear the decks like that would have forced them into something of a straightjacket. Which is where I personally think they belonged all along, if not in prison garb, but obviously the American voter of 1988 thought differently.

To my obviously contrarian mind, the real scandals relating to Iran/Contra were firstly that the whole complex of schemes were so successfully kept under wraps before the crucial elections of 1986, not that the outcomes of those elections were a right-wing sweep or anything--probably it would have made little difference to the effective balance of power in Senate and Congress, since that already leaned toward the Democrats--but so much for the power of a free press to keep the nation informed, eh? So much for the checking of ambition by ambition as even a Democratic-controlled legislature did not use its investigative powers to expose this messy flouting of its own legal mandates!

And secondly, that after the deep rot of an administration hell-bent on pursuing a very questionable agenda that had already been rebuffed by the legislative branch by extremely questionable and clearly anti-democratic means, seeking the most shady, seedy, anti-progressive partners they could find around the globe to do it, that the last years of the Reagan administration were not so wracked with turmoil that both Reagan and Bush were forced to resign or were impeached, not for health reasons but for cause, and Tip O'Neill installed as President according to the line of succession.

The fact that Democratic-controlled investigative committees wound up whitewashing the mess for the President, as well as their failure to derail these schemes much earlier, suggests complicity to me--if not of an openly scandalous kind, than a deep ideological acceptance that the USA's commitment to democratic due process is largely an ideological cover and the real movers and shakers of American policy, regardless of nominal partisan affiliation, do subscribe when push comes to shove to a much more elitist and manipulative view of how things work and should work.

If I seem bitter, this is the very time and very issues where I got good and radicalized; I've had a wry look at American politics and platitudes and professions ever since. This has hardly deterred me from throwing myself in to quite idealistic causes and taking an idealistic approach to not-so-idealistic ones too. I'm a left wing radical because I am a patriotic American who believes in the rhetoric of the Spirit of '76.

So, given the cynical nature of US leadership on both sides and of the voting public too, apparently, I suppose things were stage-managed OTL about the way we'd expect. Admitting that Reagan was suffering from mental impairment would give the newly-strengthened Democratic caucus in Congress and Senate an excuse to review Reagan-era policy across the board. To my mind of course the Iran/Contra mess was not an excuse but an urgent mandate (in the forceful, not permissive, sense) to do so at once, regardless of the Gipper's state of mind, but apparently not so to Democratic leadership. Had the Dems seized that opportunity had it been handed to them, I don't suppose with my now cynical retrospective view that they'd have substantially changed a lot, but they probably would have upset a lot of cronyish lines of succession and career paths carved out under Reagan's banner in favor of Democratic cronies, and incrementally changed a few things here and there that Republicans wouldn't have liked.

And there was always the possibility that at least some Democrats, and the unpredictably inflammable American public, might blink and take a second look at protruding clues to the mess OTL labeled "Iran/Contra" and start digging, and that the go-along-to-get-along crowd that dominated Democratic policy might get set aside or shoved aside completely by a genuine, probably bipartisan, prairie fire of national outrage and thus upset the whole applecart for all the powers that be.

So the White House and other Republican insiders had little to gain, and possibly (if not certainly) much to lose, by switching Presidents. Letting it ride was their best move. If things did get really ugly for them politically then throwing Reagan to the wolves might have been a good last-minute desperation option, maybe. But his iconic value tended to protect them too if things didn't get too hairy.

Oh yes, this too: I have tangled up two issues here, the Iran/Contra thing and Reagan's health. If things really were going serenely and a happy nation approved the Reagan way of doing things across the board, then the question of whether Reagan should have stepped down should have been a matter of his objective state of mind. But in fact the I/C stuff was writhing around like a suitcase overstuffed with snakes, and Bush the Elder's fingerprints were all over it. Throwing Reagan overboard as a sacrificial distraction would have made no sense as a move to protect his Vice-President, who contrary to his claims was darn well in "the loop." That kind of spooky stuff was in fact Bush's particular area of expertise, he having been former CIA director for instance, and intimately involved in all kinds of shadowy under the table personal politics in the Middle East and Latin America too. So it would be a gullible, ill-informed American public indeed that would be fooled by tossing the Gipper. Far better, in that sort of dire strait, to toss Bush, because if they were actually forced by American public scrutiny and outrage into actions, the public would not be so ill-informed nor gullible.

I believe that if we are ignorant and easily fooled, it is because at the end of the day, we want to be. People know that trying to involve themselves in wonky power struggles with things at stake is a social buzzsaw and they are likelier to make enemies than friends. For the most part we let our political types work out their deals and avoid paying attention just as we would if we were sausage-lovers visiting a sausage factory.
 
Given the excellence of the stagecraft at the Reagan White House, I could see such a thing being spun into Reagan's secular canonization in American politics, perhaps, as has been suggested, under some cover story of health problems relating to the assassination attempt. Under the 25th, Reagan would actually remain President; Bush would take the power of the office as Acting President.

However, the whole thing depends on Reagan going along, either by making his own declaration of disability under Article 3 or not challenging a Cabinet/VP declaration under Article 4. Were he not to agree with an Article 4 determination, he can trigger a Congressional determination of the issue by asserting that his disability no longer exists. Without Reagan's acquiescence to such an arrangement, it becomes a very messy process that would be politically damaging to whomever emerges with Presidential authority following the Congressional determination.
 
If Reagan accepted he was impaired the obvious solution would be resignation.

If there were a move under the 25th I think it would be messy. I think a lot on the Republican right would resent Daddy Bush.

I think even as President or acting President he would be opposed from the right

Of course if Reagan managed to get a third of the Senate or House America looksvery weak
 
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