The president of the United States threatened an entire civilization of people on Tuesday, triggering everyone from Ilhan Omar and Maxwell Frost to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones to demand that someone, anyone invoke the 25th Amendment to get Donald Trump out of spitting distance of the nuclear football.

When people say this, they’re really talking about Section 4 of the 25th Amendment. Passed in 1967, the first three sections were primarily focused on avoiding a rehash of the 14 months post–Kennedy assassination, during which LBJ chain-smoked, pulled all-nighters, drunk-drove his own fleet of cars—including an amphibious Ford he enjoyed charging into the lake as a “prank” to visitors—while only stopping to ask a Secret Service agent to refill his scotch and soda, and underwent a series of minor surgeries, all in the absence of a vice president or any mechanism for appointing one.

A close read of the text of Section 4, which covers transferring the functions of a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” to the vice president, reveals that it was not exactly purpose-built for a moment when the president is unpopular, corrupt, crazy, or possibly inclined to perpetrate nuclear holocaust out of rage over his depiction in an AI Lego video disseminated by a foreign adversary. It’s rather designed primarily for the president being in a coma and unable to give consent to removal. But if he has enough brain activity left to resist removal, that would lead to a situation where a larger percentage of Congress would be needed to replace the president than would be needed under the never-been-invoked option of removal by impeachment.

For most of the Constitution, at this point you would have to blame 18th-century drafters for such a mind-bendingly complex, legalistic, and loophole-ridden text, those Founders in powdered wigs who could never conceive of a modern system of governance, and the mischiefs of faction. But again, the 25th Amendment was written not even 60 years ago. And its author is still alive, and still on the faculty at Fordham University Law School.

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.”