May 23, 2026

Of Spineless Things: A Marine Biologist Manqué Considers the 25th Amendment

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

687 words 3 minute read

I was a biology major in college. I briefly entertained the idea of marine biology as a career before a frank assessment of my relationship with open water — specifically, the part where the boat moves — persuaded me otherwise. I abandoned the field. Robert Reich brought it back to me the ther day, specifically his Substack post of May 12, 2026, titled “What I Just Heard About the Plot To Oust Trump Using the 25th Amendment” — in which dinner party guests with long experience in professional politics assigned 30% odds to a scenario involving JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Mike Johnson, and John Thune collectively locating their spines. I read this and thought: I know these organisms. I studied them.

The invertebrates — animals without a vertebral column — represent roughly 97% of all animal species on earth. The figure is worth sitting with. Spinelessness is not the exception in nature. It is the overwhelming norm. What we think of as the standard body plan — the backbone, the internal skeletal structure, the capacity to hold oneself upright against gravitational and political pressure — is, statistically speaking, the aberration.

The Republican congressional caucus and the current cabinet are, in this light, simply reverting to the evolutionary mean.

Consider the relevant phyla. The jellyfish has no brain, no spine, and no central nervous system. It moves exclusively by contracting against whatever current it finds itself in. It is not, strictly speaking, going anywhere in particular. It simply responds to the environment with rhythmic, involuntary pulsing. This is an adequate description of Senate behavior since January 2025, with the additional note that jellyfish occasionally sting — reflexively, without intent, and largely without effect.

The sea cucumber presents a more alarming case study. When threatened, Holothuria expels its own internal organs through its body wall as a defensive measure. The strategy is called evisceration. The animal survives, regenerating its organs over several weeks. What it cannot explain is why it considered this preferable to simply having a spine in the first place. Congressional Republicans have been eviscerating the institution’s oversight functions on roughly this schedule, with the same apparent confidence that everything will grow back.

The tapeworm, Taenia, has dispensed entirely with its own digestive system. It absorbs nutrients directly through its skin from whatever host it has attached to — taking in everything the host provides without processing any of it through independent biological machinery. Congress operates on a similar principle. Legislation, testimony, intelligence briefings, and constitutional obligations all pass through the body without being metabolized by anything resembling independent political judgment. The host speaks. The tapeworm absorbs. The distinction between the two grows harder to locate. And the host, it should be noted, is not an abstraction. The host is the democracy in which we live — and it is measurably, visibly, declining under the arrangement.

And then there is the scenario Reich’s dinner companions are actually proposing — that Vance, Rubio, Johnson, and Thune might, under sufficient economic pressure, reanimate. In marine biology, the closest analogue is the tardigrade, the microscopic “water bear” capable of surviving vacuum, radiation, and extreme temperatures by suspending all biological activity and waiting for conditions to change. The Cabinet and congressional leadership have been in precisely this state — not dead, technically, but with every critical faculty powered down, curled into themselves, waiting. The tardigrade does eventually reanimate. The question Reich’s dinner companions are really asking is whether the conditions have finally become sufficiently adverse to trigger that process — and whether, when they do reanimate, they will remember what their critical faculties were originally for.

The 25th Amendment’s Section 4 requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to jointly declare the President unable to discharge his duties. This cabinet was selected for loyalty rather than for any other discernible quality. The mechanism exists. The organ, as biologists say of vestigial structures, is present but non-functional.

I gave up marine biology because the sea made me ill. I confess that revisiting it under these circumstances produces a similar sensation — though I recognize that the fault, in this case, is not the water’s.

FTS