The mainstream media -- right, left, and center -- are largely missing the point when reporting (and opining) on the recent revelation about Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein talking about the use of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Because in all the shocking hair-on-fire reaction, few bother to point out that neither man would have had anything to do with removing President Trump with the procedures laid out in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. The president's cabinet would be initially involved, and then Congress might also have a direct say, but "secondary officials at the Justice Department or the Federal Bureau of Investigation" are simply not on that list.

McCabe is, of course, currently out there on a book tour, hawking his tell-all of life as he saw it within the Trump administration. But the focus on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment story is kind of odd, because it was not actually news. It had been previously reported months ago, in fact (in September of last year), from Rosenstein's point of view. The only news was the additional point of view of McCabe, who was the person Rosenstein was speaking to about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

McCabe's book brought this story back up again, and the media started reporting on it as if it were some sort of scoop, even though the news wasn't exactly fresh or anything. But this time around, the story seems to have made a bigger splash.

Left-leaning media have been breathlessly reporting on the possibility that Trump could have been removed from office. Right-leaning media are using scary labels for the entire process, including "administrative coup" and/or "bureaucratic coup." The more unhinged of these even try to call the action "unconstitutional."

The left is wrong to treat the story so seriously, because it really wasn't all that big a deal. The right is wrong to try to impart sinister motives, even though their labels are actually (for once) mostly correct. Except for the bit about being unconstitutional, since (obviously) the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is part of the U.S. Constitution itself. It'd be like trying to make the case that free speech was unconstitutional, or refusing to testify by using your Fifth Amendment rights was unconstitutional. By definition, parts of the Constitution cannot be called (by any rational individual) "unconstitutional."

But the labels "administrative coup" and "bureaucratic coup" are actually pretty accurate. I prefer the term "constitutional coup" myself, but they really all are saying the same thing.

I first wrote about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment over ten years ago, in relation to a similar thing that was being attempted in the state of Illinois (to get rid of then-Governor Rod "Blaggy" Blagojevich). I used the term "constitutional coup" in the title of the article, and just before quoting the text of the amendment itself, wrote:

But we're getting lost in the wrong section of the amendment. Because the next section clearly lays out the legal process for a coup of the President of the United States. It doesn't use the word "coup," but the end result would be the same.

I went on to note that the bar for removing a president via Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment actually set the bar higher than for impeachment, and concluded that therefore if any president were ever to be forced out of office, it'd likely be by impeachment and not the Twenty-Fifth.

I revisited the Twenty-Fifth Amendment on Donald Trump's sixth day in office. It seemed like a dandy time to dust off the amendment and dig into how it would actually happen, for some reason.

I began by examining the text of the relevant section:

"The principal officers of the executive departments" means the president's cabinet. So if Mike Pence decides that Donald Trump is mentally unfit for office and if he can get over half the cabinet to back him up, he can wrest the presidency away from Trump. This is what has caused all the recent speculation, and it's my guess that this section of this particular amendment is going to become more and more well-known as the Trump presidency proceeds. Calls to "take the 25th" may become common if Trump does something incredibly outrageous, in other words.

This has, to some degree or another, come true. I'd be willing to bet good money that there have been more news articles written on the subject during Trump's time in office than during any president's tenure since at least Ronald Reagan or perhaps Richard Nixon (Nixon for obvious reasons, and Reagan because at the end of his term his mental acuity was openly being questioned).

I continue, in this article, to perform a deep dive into exactly how the process would unfold. This is important to understand, because most news stories never contemplate the process at all. It is presented as a simple process of the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet signing a letter and sending it to Congress. The implication is always "and then Mike Pence becomes president," but that's not actually the case (unless Trump chose to accept their evaluation of his fitness to serve, which seems unlikely). If Trump objected, then Congress would decide, and by a two-thirds majority in both houses (unlike impeachment, which requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate but only a simple majority of the House). Even if successful, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment still leaves a loophole, because Mike Pence would then only officially become "Acting President," which (though unsaid) might mean Trump could continue to still be "President Trump," just without any power or duties. Which is why I ended with the same conclusion I had come to before: that impeachment was a far easier and cleaner option to use, should it become necessary to force Trump out.

Now, you can argue that Trump himself probably wouldn't refuse to leave, but who knows what he'd do in such a situation? It would be a completely unprecedented constitutional crisis, so there simply are no previous rules to follow. We'd all be making it up as we went along, Trump included. But whatever the end result, the process itself is a lot more complicated than some (even some professional journalists) seem aware of, at this point. It's not just signing one letter. Trump would fight back. For up to three weeks, we'd effectively have two leaders for our government, which would be precisely as chaotic as it sounds. And even if the effort were successful, we might still have President Trump kicking around the White House afterwards. When you think it all the way through, impeachment would likely be the better route to take. If Donald Trump did something so outrageous that he lost support of roughly half the Republicans in Congress, then the case for impeachment would likely be just as easy to make as taking the Twenty-Fifth. At least with impeachment, once it was over, Trump would be gone.

But it still could happen -- the one thing the Twenty-Fifth has going for it that impeachment doesn't is how fast it would happen. It could be over within a few weeks, whereas an impeachment and Senate trial would likely take months, even in the best-case scenario. And it's entirely plausible that time could be a major factor in getting Trump out of office.

But putting aside the question of how likely it is to happen, the conservative commentators are entirely correct that this would be a constitutional (or "administrative" or "bureaucratic") coup d'état. But we've decided that such a mechanism is necessary, which is why the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was ratified during the Cold War. There's one very good historic example of why it might be necessary, which I explained the last time I wrote about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment:

Ninety-nine years ago this month, the president of the United States suffered a stroke. In September of 1919, President Woodrow Wilson became incapacitated. He was neither physically nor mentally able to perform his constitutional duties.

Others at first hid the president's condition from the public. His wife and his cabinet maintained the pretense that Wilson was still in charge and still doing his job. He wasn't. In fact, his wife was more in charge of the United States government than anyone else, as she dealt with routine matters and handed off more serious matters to the cabinet members to deal with. She even brought in a complicit journalist who wrote a "fake news" story (in the original meaning of the term) to convince the public that all was well, when in reality all was decidedly not well with the president.

Now, Wilson had done nothing that could be considered impeachable, so even if the press corps and Wilson's cabinet hadn't gone along with the charade, there was really nothing that could be done about the situation. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was still a half-century in the future. But it might have come in handy at least at this one point in American history, had it existed at the time.

Which is why the framework for such a coup was added. It really was intended to deal with a president who was somehow medically incapacitated, and has been used in very limited form (under other sections of the amendment's text) when presidents have had surgery performed on them. A letter is signed giving the vice president temporary presidential power, and then when the crisis is over the power is returned to the president. Although it has never been used to depose a president, the framework for doing so remains part of our Constitution. Which is why I've always called it a constitutional coup.

But to return to my initial point, all of this does not matter one whit in the story about Rosenstein bringing up the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to McCabe. Because neither one of them is in the cabinet. Neither man would have had a vote, plain and simple. So it really doesn't matter how much they discussed it, or even what they said about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. They are free -- as is every citizen -- to speak and speculate about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to their heart's content. Because no matter what they concluded about it, they had no power to even initiate the process. Not only did they not have a vote, they could never have started the process moving at all, other than perhaps raising the issue with Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions obviously would never have acted upon their suggestion, so even if they had done everything in their power to suggest it to him, it would have gone precisely nowhere.

This basic fact seems to be missing from almost all the breathless reporting. Somehow the media is trying to imply that had Rosenstein and McCabe agreed that the Twenty-Fifth was somehow justified then Trump might have been forced out of office. This is simply not true. It's not even remotely true. Even if Jeff Sessions had decided to act (which I find totally and utterly inconceivable, personally), he would have had to convince Mike Pence and half the cabinet to go along with him. That is simply not plausible to even seriously contemplate, especially considering that the time period under discussion was during the very first few months of the Trump administration.

In the end, it really doesn't matter what these two men said about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, because it was nothing more than the sheerest speculation on their part or, perhaps, some wishful thinking. Which really should be mentioned in every story in the news, but somehow is not.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant