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It does not come as a great surprise to see that less than a year into his second term in office, President Trump is already thinking about a third.
“I would love to do it,” he told reporters on Air Force One this week.
He has, in fact, been thinking about a third term for years.
“We’re going to win four more years in the White House,” he said in 2020. “And then after that, we’ll negotiate, right? Because we’re probably — based on the way we were treated — we are probably entitled to another four after that.”
And earlier this year, he told NBC News that he wasn’t “joking” about serving a third term. “There are methods which you could do it,” he said.
The ob…
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It does not come as a great surprise to see that less than a year into his second term in office, President Trump is already thinking about a third.
“I would love to do it,” he told reporters on Air Force One this week.
He has, in fact, been thinking about a third term for years.
“We’re going to win four more years in the White House,” he said in 2020. “And then after that, we’ll negotiate, right? Because we’re probably — based on the way we were treated — we are probably entitled to another four after that.”
And earlier this year, he told NBC News that he wasn’t “joking” about serving a third term. “There are methods which you could do it,” he said.
The obvious response to Trump’s musings is that the Constitution limits each president to two full terms. “No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice, and no person who has held the office of president, or acted as president, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected president shall be elected to the office of the president more than once,” reads the 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951.
But allies of the president insist that there is a plan — a loophole — that might allow Trump to circumvent the Constitution and serve another four years or more.
“Trump is going to be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that,” said Steve Bannon last week. “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is.”
This sounds plausible, but it is wrong. First, it treats the Constitution as a language game whose meaning depends less on the text, structure, history and purpose of the document and more on whether you can use the fundamental indeterminacy of language to brute-force your preferred outcome.
But that is not how you should read the Constitution, which isn’t a rigid set of instructions to be gamed by clever lawyers, but a political document meant to structure the rules of self-government in the United States. The 22nd Amendment was written to change one of those rules and limit the president’s term of office, regardless of the circumstances. Any apparent “loophole” is a mirage produced by a basic misunderstanding of what it is that the Constitution set out to accomplish. A quick look at the history and debate behind the amendment makes this clear.
Two terms in office had been the norm for American presidents since George Washington declined to stand for a third in 1796, instead handing the reins to his vice president, John Adams. In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt became the first president to run for and win a third term of office. He continued the streak in 1944, winning another term but dying in office just a few months after he delivered his fourth Inaugural Address.
In the following midterm elections, Republicans won a House and a Senate majority for the first time since the early 1930s. And at the top of the agenda for the 80th Congress was a constitutional amendment to make the two-term tradition a formal rule of American politics. Although this was a clear response to Roosevelt, congressional arguments in favor of the two-term limit emphasized the vast scope of presidential power and the threat it might pose to American democracy if left in the hands of one man over an extended period of time.
“If long tenure of office of the president was a threat to our republican form of government as stated by President Jefferson nearly 140 years ago, with his limited powers, small disbursements, small Army and Navy and a small number of appointees, how much greater must that threat be to our republican form of government and to the liberties of the American people today?” asked Representative John Marshall Robsion of Kentucky during floor debates over the amendment in 1947.
“I favor this proposed amendment,” said Representative John Jennings Jr. of Tennessee. “Only by its adoption can the people be assured that we shall never have a dictator in this land. Without such a limit on the number of terms a man may serve in the presidency, the time may come when a man of vaulting ambition becomes president.” Backed by a “subservient Congress,” continued Jennings, such a man “could well name to the Supreme Court of the United States men of his political faith and economic thinking” who could “sweep aside and overthrow the safeguards of the Constitution” and “overrule the settled states of law that have been declared and recognized for a hundred years.”
“Almost all of the rest of the world has slipped away from the foundations of freedom and skidded dangerously close to the shoals of executive domination, one-man rule, dictatorship and ruthless tyranny,” declared Representative Karl Earl Mundt of South Dakota. “Let us consolidate our gains in self-government by passing this resolution to prevent any president hereafter — Republican or Democratic — from perpetuating himself in office.”
The overriding concern among congressional supporters of the 22nd Amendment was to limit the president’s overall tenure of office. They did not parse the difference between service and election; they did not intend to create some special scenario by which, if a president followed the right steps, he could circumvent the restriction. They meant, simply, to restrict the president to two full terms for fear of what might be if presidential power fell into the wrong hands.
“To grant extended power to any one man would be a definite step in the direction of autocracy, regardless of the name given the office, whether it be president, king, dictator, emperor or whatever title the office may carry,” Senator Chapman Revercomb of West Virginia said during his chamber’s debate over the proposed amendment. “It would be a definite step toward the destruction of real freedom of the people.”
What I Wrote
I wrote about why the United States might need an imperial Congress after Trump:
We are still far away from anything like a post-Trump period in American politics. But it will come, and it is not too early to think about the reconstruction and renewal of American democracy. What should be at the top of any agenda, given the magnitude of the challenges that will face us when Trump and his movement are gone, is the rebirth of Congress as the dominant force in the business of government. And in particular, a Congress that doesn’t hesitate to use its powers — hard and soft, formal and informal — to reshape the American political system.
I also joined my colleagues David French and Michelle Cottle for a discussion of the shutdown, congressional weakness and what to do about it.
Now Reading
Jesse Olsavsky on antebellum vigilance committees and the Fugitive Slave Act for Hammer and Hope magazine.
James Oakes on the slave trade during the Civil War for The New York Review of Books.
Niela Orr on D’Angelo for The London Review of Books.
Aslı Igsız on Turkey’s slide into authoritarianism for Dissent magazine.
Dan Holtmeyer on the biopolitics of the Trump administration for Liberal Currents.
Photo of the Week
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From Coney Island this summer.
Now Eating: Boston Baked Beans
I’m making a simple pot of baked beans this weekend to mark the onset of cold weather. This recipe, from New York Times Cooking, gets the job done.
Ingredients
1 pound dry navy beans or Great Northern beans
Salt
½ pound slab bacon, cut into cubes
1 medium onion, peeled and chopped
⅓ cup molasses
2 teaspoons dry mustard
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
Directions
Soak beans in a large bowl of water for 6 hours or overnight. Drain beans and put them in a large oven-safe pot with a heavy bottom and a tightfitting lid. Add 1 teaspoon salt and enough cool water to cover 2 inches above the beans. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer gently, stirring occasionally, until the beans are just tender, approximately 30 to 40 minutes. Drain and remove beans.
Heat the oven to 250 degrees. Bring a kettle full of water to a boil on the stove. Return the heavy-bottomed pot to the stove and turn the heat to medium high. Cook the bacon in the bottom of the pot until it begins to brown, then turn off the heat and add the chopped onion and, on top of it, the beans. Mix together molasses, mustard and black pepper, and add the mixture to the pot. Pour in enough boiling water to cover beans, put the lid on and bake, occasionally adding more water to keep beans covered, until they are tender but not falling apart, 4 to 5 hours.
Remove beans from oven, uncover, stir and season with salt. With the lid off, return pot to oven and let beans finish cooking, uncovered and without additional water, until the sauce has thickened and the top is deeply crusty, about 45 minutes more.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.
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