His name is John D. Feerick, he turns 90 in July, and when we first tried to contact him on the day of perhaps the maximum interest in the constitutional amendment he penned, he was teaching a class—a Rule of Law seminar on (inter alia) the 25th Amendment, naturally. When he returned the Prospect’s call, he was not inclined to weigh in on the viability of his handiwork for deposing a president both Candace Owens and Rep. Seth Moulton have deemed “insane.”
“I’ve had questions like this going back to Reagan’s time, but I try to stay away from getting involved in questions about trying to apply the 25th Amendment to any situation,” he said. “I’m an independent voter, and I try to look at these matters not through the lens of ideology, but out of love for America and what is consistent with the Constitution.”
Feerick joined Fordham in 1982 after a career as an employment attorney at Skadden, Arps. After becoming partner, he rose through the American Bar Association, and served on its Conference on Presidential Inability and Vice-Presidential Vacancy. This was conceived right after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which raised concerns that if his injuries were not fatal but rendered him incapacitated, there was no way to remove him from office, nor was there any way for Lyndon Johnson to choose a vice president once ascending to the presidency. But Feerick said congressional hand-wringing over the topic first surfaced during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who suffered a heart attack while in office in 1955 and a stroke in 1957, the seriousness of which did not emerge until after he left office. On November 17, 1963, The New York Times published an excerpt of a letter Feerick had written criticizing Congress for its failure “to eliminate the possibility of a gap in the executive because of confusion existing over the meaning of the succession provision of the Constitution.” Who, he wondered, “has the right to determine the commencement and termination of an inability?”
Five days after the letter was published, the question took on terrifying new urgency, and Sen. Birch Bayh (D-IN) tapped Feerick to write an amendment taking care of such line-of-succession emergencies, which has since become a rallying cry to remove someone deemed mentally and spiritually, if not physically, incapacitated. The law professor wrote a whole book about it in 1976. What amazes him to this day is that the question was floated at the Constitutional Convention back in 1787, when Delaware delegate John Dickinson asked “what is the extent of the term ‘disability’ and who is to be the judge of it?” But scouring the records for any sign of an answer from his contemporaries, Feerick only found … crickets. “Nobody answered him!”