Kamala Harris can use the 25th Amendment to her advantage

If Vice President Kamala Harris is afraid that the Democratic Party will bypass her in any effort to replace President Joe Biden as the party's presidential nominee, there is a path she can pursue to protect her political ambitions.

As calls for Biden to quit the race continue to grow, speculation is growing in earnest about who could replace him. And while the obvious replacement candidate is Harris, other names such as Govs. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), and even former first lady Michelle Obama have been proposed as alternatives.

It should be noted that such a scenario remains unlikely, even if Biden drops out of the race. In such a scenario, Harris will immediately become the likely replacement due to her position as vice president, the short window of time until the Democratic National Convention, and the massive campaign war chest that the Biden campaign has assembled, which can only be used by the vice president.

There is even a discussion about bypassing Harris because she suffers from approval ratings as bad or worse than Biden's, raising serious questions about her ability to win the election on her own. But Harris is unlikely to take such a slight lying down — after all, she harbors serious ambitions of her own. If another candidate is nominated in her place, it will likely spell the end of her political career.

That being said, as the sitting vice president, she does not have to take this lying down. Harris has one tool in her shed that would make it extremely difficult for the party to nominate someone else if Biden drops out: the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.

Let's take a look at the text of the amendment:

"Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President."

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As the text says, Harris cannot enact this on her own. She needs the support of a majority of the Cabinet, chosen entirely by Biden, to go along with her plan.

While this may be an uphill climb, if she were successful, it would put the party in the awkward position of replacing not only the sitting president but also the acting president. Of course, it would be seen as a major betrayal of Biden, who resurrected her political career after her 2020 presidential campaign fell apart before a single vote was cast in the Democratic primary. But if the party is hell-bent on bypassing her in the line of succession, it may be her only hope of saving her political career.