On Tuesday, House Democrats led by New York representative Jamie Rankin proposed setting up a commission to determine whether Donald Trump is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” under Section 4 of the Constitution’s 25th Amendment. As with previous attempts to undermine the President, Raskin’s effort will prove a performative success but a practical failure.

Democrats are under tremendous pressure from their base and donors to “do something” about Trump. This is something; it’s just not something that will work. Section 4 of the 25th Amendment was written to fill a logical gap in the Constitution’s succession provisions, which had long hung like a sword of Damocles over the republic: what would happen if a president was alive, but unable to perform his duties — and unwilling (or unable) to resign from office?

Presidents had been seriously ill before. After his stroke in 1919, rumors spread that Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated and that his wife was running the White House in his name. Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955 also raised the issue, though he recovered quickly and never lost control of his mental faculties. But there remained no provision for a president who was, say, comatose or brain-dead. So Congress passed the 25th to provide a work-around for this and other succession issues.

Could it apply to a president who is conscious but slowly slipping into senility and dementia? After all, the text contains no limits on what “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” means. But it is noteworthy that the amendment first places this judgment in the president himself in section 3, and then in his cabinet in section 4. The amendment does allow for Congress to select another group to make that decision instead of the cabinet, but it has never done so. Members of Congress would need to take that action by passing a law, and that means either with Trump’s signature (not happening) or over his veto (equally unlikely).

The cabinet is a body of people who are politically aligned with the president who nominated them. Such a group would have to see a truly serious health problem before they shunted aside their chief, not just a difference of opinion. If we need any greater proof of that, we can look at Joe Biden’s cabinet, which never once bestirred itself to address the problem, even after Biden’s disastrous debate performance laid bare his mental diminution to the world. Because he could function well enough to keep his party’s agenda in place, allies didn’t worry about what would happen if he got the proverbial 3am phone call. Thankfully, we never had to find out.

So for the Democrats to now demand Republican cabinet members cast out their leader is an obvious political stunt. Did Trump say some odd things about how “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not come to terms with him? He certainly did. But this is bad judgment, not mental incapacity. Had he followed through with the Democrats’ worst imaginings and launched devastating — even nuclear — strikes against Iran, there would have just been cause to object. But the way to remove a president for political reasons is impeachment and conviction. The Democrats know this: they impeached Trump twice during his first term.

Since 2017, Trump’s more vehement opponents have seen the 25th Amendment as an emergency exit from the knotty problem of his having been elected. But that has never been its purpose. Democrats might call Trump “crazy” in the colloquial sense, but if he is crazy it is in the same way he was before the election. He says odd things. He sends mean tweets. He changes his mind. The voters knew all of this and more, and they still chose him. If Democrats want to overcome that, the 25th Amendment is not the way they should do it.