When President-elect Donald J. Trump met with House Republicans on Wednesday morning, he suggested he might need their help to try to circumvent the Constitution and run for a third term in the future — a comment that was met with laughter by his friendly audience.
“I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, ‘He’s so good we’ve got to figure something else out,’ ” Mr. Trump told Republicans, who appeared to take it as a joke.
One Democrat is moving quickly to make sure that cannot happen. Representative Dan Goldman of New York plans on Thursday to introduce a resolution clarifying that the Constitution’s two-term limit for presidents applies even if the terms are not consecutive. It asserts that the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which states that a person who has been elected president twice cannot run again, “applies to two terms in the aggregate” and leaves no loophole.
In other words, Mr. Trump — who served from 2017 to 2021 and is slated to assume the presidency again in January — could not seek another term in the future.
Mr. Goldman’s resolution, which was obtained by The New York Times, also reaffirms that the 22nd Amendment applies to Mr. Trump.
There is little chance that Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, would bring such a resolution to the floor for a vote.
But Mr. Goldman’s resolution is an early indication of how Democrats may try to hold Mr. Trump accountable and defend democratic institutions with Republicans fully in control of Congress and few guardrails remaining to rein him in. Introducing the measure allows Mr. Goldman to draw public attention to Mr. Trump’s statements, which he calls “anti-democratic and authoritarian.”
Mr. Trump’s seemingly lighthearted comment on Wednesday was not the first time he has hinted that he might like to stay in the White House past his next term. In July, he told attendees of a conservative Christian event that they “won’t have to vote anymore” if he won the election, noting: “it’ll be fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”
In May, while speaking to the National Rifle Association, Mr. Trump mused out loud: ‘‘I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term or two-term? Are we three-term or two-term if we win?’’
His remarks about serving more than two terms go back years. In 2020, when he was still in office, Mr. Trump told supporters at a rally in Nevada: ‘‘We’re going to win four more years in the White House. 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.”
His allies have made similar statements. Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, said in a statement celebrating her own victory in a new district that “we must rally behind President Trump to secure his third term.” While some Republicans speculated that Ms. Boebert was referring in that statement to her belief that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election, her comment and others like it have made Mr. Goldman and other Democrats concerned that Republicans don’t actually see Mr. Trump’s musings as a joke at all.
In a statement, Mr. Goldman called on Democrats and Republicans alike to “stand by the oath we all took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and confirm the Congress’ commitment to this principle.”
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