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President Trump’s suggestion that he might run for a third term was met with outrage from Democrats and the media who compared him to a dictator for perhaps the 296th time.
“If Trump Gets a 3rd Term, Democracy Will Have Already Ended,” the New Yorker, a magazine which declares the end of democracy every second weekend, urgently warned.
If running for a third term makes you a dictator, what did running for a fourth term make FDR?
Democrats suddenly argued for the sacredness of the 22nd Amendment (which in recent years they had spent almost as much time thinking about as the 3rd Amendment) that had been championed by Republicans over the opposition of Democrats in response to FDR’s fourth term.
“The Twenty-second Amendment is one of the worst that has been put into the Constitution, except for the Prohibition Amendment. I’m going down to the Senate at the end of this week and testify before the committee and tell them exactly what I think about that amendment,” President Harry Truman said. “I’m going to tell them that I think it ought to be repealed.”
Democrats formed the National Committee Against Limiting the Presidency and the majority of House and Senate Democrats voted against it.
Former Speaker John McCormack who led the House Democratic Caucus, warned, “we are tying the hands of Americans in the future from exercising in a grave emergency the judgment which they may deem is for the best interests of our country.”
The media accused Republicans of being motivated by revenge against FDR who had won four elections. They could not accept that Republicans, having lived through an imperial presidency, were genuinely afraid of another FDR, and were not spitefully attacking a dead man. The FDR era had seen broad violations of the Constitution, the elevation of a cult of personality, and a profound power shift from the legislative branch to the executive branch that was never undone.
Ultimately it was FDR’s medical issues that ended his presidential career and not the people.
Even before FDR, Republicans had grappled with the prospect of Woodrow Wilson seeking a third term even though he had already been incapacitated and the country was being run by his wife. Once again, Wilson’s medical problems, not an election, prevented him from continuing to violate the Constitution and impose his will on the country.
But in the 80s, Republicans were the ones who had a seemingly unstoppable candidate and began talking about repealing the 22nd Amendment. Reagan never had the powers that FDR did because he was weighed down by a militantly hostile Democratic Congress, but he made up for them with charisma and the ability to win the hearts and minds of much of the country.
Democrats feared a third Reagan term and Republicans looked forward to one. They dreamed of what a Reagan presidency backed by a Republican Congress might be like. And had such a thing actually happened, American history might have gone down a much better road.
Even with his second term over, Reagan promised to campaign for the repeal of the 22nd Amendment. As the administration’s ‘Promises Made, Promises Kept’ handbook described “this effort was not in any way self-serving. Rather it reflected the President’s strong belief that the American people should be given the most freedom possible in selecting their national leader.”
While Democrats would never have allowed Reagan to serve a third term, the president’s health made the point moot, much as it had for Wilson and FDR, and growing media scrutiny of presidents made it far more difficult to hide the decaying physical condition of the man at the top. Or at least it would until the media actively colluded with the Biden administration.
Whatever Reagan thought about his successor, George H.W. Bush proved completely inadequate in every possible sense of the word and barely made it through one lone term.
After Bush, Democrats became interested in repealing the 22nd Amendment to keep Bill Clinton in office. Rep. Barney Frank, who had a male brothel operating in his house, was particularly obsessed with repealing the 22nd Amendment to enable Bill Clinton to run for three terms.
Unlike Wilson, FDR and Reagan, it wasn’t poor health that would have prevented Clinton from running for a third term (although the former president appeared to decline badly over the years for unknown reasons) but the sheer weight of scandals and public dissatisfaction. Democrats vastly overestimated the sustainability of what they considered to be his rock star qualities.
And besides, Hillary Clinton was impatiently waiting in the wings for her moment on the stage.
There was more talk, muted, of repealing the 22nd Amendment to make way for a third term for a second Bush, but there was little public interest in a third Clinton or Bush term. The talk revived somewhat more in earnest during the hypnotic years of the Obama era. Democrats were convinced that they had found a politician with an unbreakable grip on the public psyche.
Liberal historian John Judis wrote an enthusiastic op-ed titled Eight More Years! The Case for Removing Term Limits mourning that “Obama, like Clinton, can campaign for future Democratic nominees, and perhaps create his own foundation, but much of the experience he gained in office will be lost – and, because of the 22nd Amendment, will never be reclaimed.”
An online pressure group was set up and a resolution was introduced that went nowhere.
America was spared the prospect of another eight years of open borders, terrorism and economic misery. And Obama’s magnetism, which once seemed overwhelming, had drained away by his second term until few Democrats were hungry for more Obama by the end.
The question of repealing or bypassing the 22nd Amendment has been reopened yet again.
Depending on the wording or implementation, this in theory could also reopen the question for past presidents including Bill Clinton, likely too non-functional, George W. Bush, not interested or popular enough, and Barack Obama, who might love to take advantage of such a measure.
Could we see a matchup between Obama and Trump in 2028? Probably not.
Democrats were reluctant to embrace the 22nd Amendment, but ultimately saw the wisdom of limiting the power of the presidency. And so did Republicans even as they went back and forth. Powerful politicians, including former Senate majority leaders Sen. Harry Reid and Sen. Mitch McConnell, flirted with the idea only to let it go. Repealing amendments is hard and unlikely to succeed. Amending the 22nd, as has been proposed, along with other loopholes, including the proposed VP run, would face legal challenges, but might not prove altogether impossible.
It still likely won’t happen.
President Trump would be 86 years old at the end of a hypothetical third term. And while he’s been a vigorous figure, and founders like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson continued to be active into their early 80s, the human body and the human mind has its limitations.
So does the American public which elected Trump to non-consecutive terms as an insurgent.
Even before the 22nd Amendment, Americans tended to reject third terms for even heroic figures like Ulysses S. Grant, who had his own cult of personality at the time, and FDR would likely not have gotten away with it if he hadn’t been running a country in a state of constant crisis and if the Republican opposition had been capable of summoning any real enthusiasm.
President Trump can make the FDR argument to Americans that he is uniquely positioned to save the country and should be able to do it. And that is exactly what opponents of the 22nd believe a president should be able to do. The genius of the 22nd debate is that every argument Democrats made for FDR, Clinton and Obama can be brushed off for Trump’s third term.
And that is why Democrats and the media should stop pretending that those arguments represent tyranny or the end of democracy. Not when they were the ones making them. Trump is far from the first president to propose repealing the 22nd amendment so he can run again. And Democrats have more consistently supported repealing the 22nd than keeping it.
The 22nd Amendment is about more than any one man. Term limits express a lack of faith in the public and in the systemic structure of open elections. And the debates around them are often self-serving. There’s a reason that Congress imposed term limits on the president, but resisted imposing them on itself. And why so many presidents have wanted to repeal the 22nd but thought that term limits on Congress might be a very good idea.
Term limits become an exciting idea for Democrats when applied to Republican branches of government. That is why they have been agitating for term limits for Supreme Court justices. And they also become an exciting idea for Republicans when Democrats appear to have a lock on a branch of government which is why they championed them against a Democrat Congress.
Perhaps, enchanted by a Trump vs. Obama showdown, Democrats and Republicans will join hands to repeal the 22nd Amendment to enable the closest thing to a Reagan vs FDR election between two charismatic term-limited presidents embodying two very different points of view.
Most likely though the 22nd will stay where it is, but Democrats, who fought the amendment tooth and nail, and repeatedly introduced bills to repeal it, will spend the next four years hypocritically singing its praises as the only thing standing between us and total tyranny.
