Dean John Feerick spoke with Constitution Daily about his work on the 25th Amendment, and the hidden powers of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
As a young attorney, current Fordham Law professor and former dean John Feerick worked with Bayh’s subcommitee to draft the language that eventually became the 25th Amendment. He recounted the arduous process in a 1995 law journal article, “The Twenty-Fifth Amendment: An Explanation And Defense.”
Bayh introduced Senate Joint Resolution 139 in December 1963, just months after replacing the late Estes Kefauver as subcommittee chair. (There was reported talk that the subcommittee would be phased out until Bayh, a freshman Senator, asked for the assignment.) Kefauver also had championed an amendment dealing with presidential disability.
Feerick recounted that initial committee hearings in 1964 called leading historians and experts to testify about different scenarios about the inability of a President to perform duties and the process of filling an in-term Vice Presidential vacancy. The Senate approved the subcommittee’s recommendations in September 1964, but the House didn’t act during the election year and out of respect to Speaker John McCormick, who was next in line to the presidency with no sitting Vice President in office.
In January 1965, Bayh reintroduced the bill in the Senate, with support from the newly elected President Lyndon Johnson. After a debate between Bayh and Everett Dirksen, the bill was modified and approved again by a unanimous Senate. In the House, Feerick said more than 30 possible versions of the amendment were before its Subcommitee on the Constitution. Bayh and future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell (as president of the American Bar Association) testified in the House. The House version passed by a 386-29 vote.
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“The Twenty-fifth Amendment is the product of extensive debate and discussion, in which full account was taken of the history of presidential succession and the many worthy suggestions offered for improvements in the succession framework. The amendment provides an approach to presidential succession which allows for an effective transfer of power in all cases of presidential inability,” Feerick concluded.