When Republicans took control of Congress in 1947, they were still angry that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had won a fourth term in 1944, and they set out to pass a constitutional amendment to limit future presidents to two terms. John Jennings, Republican of Tennessee, stood on the House floor and said a 22nd Amendment was necessary to prevent a dictator from taking over the country.
“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,” Mr. Jennings said on Feb. 6, 1947. Such a man, backed by a “subservient Congress” and a compliant Supreme Court, could “sweep aside and overthrow the safeguards of the Constitution,” he said. Without such a law, a president could use the office’s great powers to tilt the political system in his favor and win repeated re-election. Eventually, that president could come to resemble a king, effectively unbound by the Constitution’s checks and balances.
In the decades after the country ratified the 22nd Amendment in 1951, members of both parties occasionally chafed against its restrictions, but no sitting president openly talked about evading it — until recently. Mr. Jennings’s warning on the House floor now looks prophetic: President Trump is a man of vaulting ambition. Congress is largely subservient to his agenda. And he keeps mentioning the idea of a third term.
“I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we’ve got to figure something else out,’” he said shortly after being re-elected last November. Though Republicans in the room chuckled at the time, he said in March that he was “not joking” and that “there are methods which you could do it.”
This past weekend, he seemed to both step back from the idea and reiterate it. “It’s something that, to the best of my knowledge, you’re not allowed to do,” Mr. Trump told NBC News. But then he once again claimed that the decision was his to make. “Well, there are ways of doing it,” he said. All the while, his website continues to sell “Trump 2028” merchandise, including baseball caps for $50 apiece and $36 T-shirts that proclaim, “Rewrite the rules.”
It may be that this talk is mostly a tactical attempt to ward off the stigma of being a lame duck. Congressional Republicans have responded partly by gently disagreeing and partly by downplaying the idea as a joke. “Not without a change in the Constitution,” Senator John Thune, the majority leader, told reporters in March. He added, “I think that you guys keep asking the question, and I think he’s probably having some fun with it, probably messing with you.”
But Mr. Trump’s third-term fantasizing is more dangerous than this response suggests, and it deserves more forceful pushback. He has a history, after all, of using seemingly outlandish speculation to push ideas he genuinely favors — such as overturning an election result — into mainstream discourse. He tests boundaries to see which limits are actually enforced. Even when he backs away from a provocation, he often succeeds in raising doubts about those limits. His behavior is consistent with a president who indeed wants to serve a third term, if not more, and who keeps raising the idea in the hope of getting Americans comfortable with it.
More broadly, Mr. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his disdain for constitutional checks on a president’s power. He has ignored parts of judges’ rulings, deported immigrants without due process and tried to eliminate the 14th Amendment’s grant of birthright citizenship through an executive order. All of this behavior suggests that he would prefer to wield power without limits.
The appropriate response from the rest of the political system — especially from Republican members of Congress, governors and others — is not to laugh off his musings. It is to assert the clarity of the law: Mr. Trump is barred from serving a third term, period.
The 22nd Amendment, to be specific, says no person shall be “elected” to the office of president more than twice, but it doesn’t say that no president shall serve more than twice. This has long led to an academic parlor game: Could a term-limited president run as a vice president and then be handed the Oval Office when his running mate resigns? Mr. Trump has said that is one method by which he might return as president.
But another amendment — the 12th — appears to rule out that possibility. Its final sentence declares that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice president of the United States.” Together, the two amendments make clear that Mr. Trump’s time in office cannot extend beyond his current term.
Republican politicians and conservative legal scholars often talk about the original intent of the Constitution’s authors, and that intent is crystal clear in this case. The goal of the 22nd Amendment was to restrict presidents to two terms. As Representative Edward McCowen, Republican of Ohio, said during the House debate in 1947, “Eight years is long enough for a good president, and four years is too long for a bad one.”
In the decades since 1951, politicians from both parties occasionally called for the repeal of the 22nd Amendment, including Harry Truman and Mitch McConnell. But they did not argue that the amendment was unclear or could simply be evaded. They recognized that somebody who disagrees with a law should follow a legal process to change it. If Mr. Trump and his acolytes believe they have Congress and the states on their side, they are free to start a repeal campaign. What they should not do is pretend that any part of the Constitution is merely a suggestion. It’s the law.
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