Repeal the 22nd Amendment

The introduction in the House of a constitutional amendment to permit a president to serve a third term if his first two were non-consecutive is a jerry-rigged act of fealty to President Trump. The amendment’s champion, Congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee, is an ally of Mr. Trump, who just began his second non-consecutive term. We, for one, don’t see the logic of an amendment that opens the way only for Mr. Trump.We’d prefer simply repealing the 22nd Amendment. That would allow any president to try for a third term. The Constitution originally ordained only that the president “shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years.” The question was debated at the Convention. Hamilton and Madison wanted lifetime tenure. Jefferson warned that “the total abandonment of the principle of rotation” in the Presidency and Senate would “end in abuse.”The Constitutional Convention eventually did something like split the difference by adopting four year terms but no cap on how many there could be. That abuse did not ensue is laid to Washington, who stepped aside after two terms, setting a precedent but not a law. Most presidents served only one term, some two. President Theodore Roosevelt, most notably, tried but failed to secure a third term despite his Bull Moose best. The Republic prospered. The amendment’s proximate cause was President Franklin Roosevelt’s election to an astounding fourth term. He also, though, happened to win World War II. That example, in any event, propelled the 22nd Amendment, which, when it was ratified in 1951, set a two-term limit for presidents. President Truman quipped that it was “one of the worst that has been put into the Constitution, except for the Prohibition Amendment.”We were startled to find The New York Sun itself was untypically wishy-washy on this head. In February 1947, the editors then flying the flag of the Sun issued a three-paragraph editorial under the headline “For Limited Presidential Tenure.” The chief significance it saw in the adoption of the amendment by the House was its signal to the Senate. It noted that Democrats, whose votes would be needed, were worried about the reflection on FDR. The Sun conceded, though, that such an amendment would inherently establish for Franklin Delano Roosevelt a “unique position in American history.” It reckoned that there would be “no difficulty” in bringing the measure to the floor of the Senate but that its passage by two-thirds of the upper chamber would “require the most determined efforts by the Republican majority.” By the time the matter was ratified, the Sun was gone.We’d like to think that had the Sun kept on it might have found its voice in speaking out the sentiments of the American people. Truman reasoned that “there are clearly times when more than two terms are both necessary and wise,” with which it is hard to argue. Other presidents, too, have chafed at term limits. President Obama, in 2016, joked that he was “confident” that if he had run again he “could have mobilized a majority of the American people.”“I suspect,” Mr. Trump himself joked to House Republicans after winning a second term that “I won’t be running again, unless you do something … Unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we have to just figure it out.’” Now comes Mr. Ogles offering to “figure it out.” Yet to make its way to become part of the Constitution the Ogles bill would have to pass Congress by a two-thirds vote in both houses and then be ratified by three-quarters of the 50 states.That’s a tough row to hoe. Only 27 amendments have made it into the parchment since its ratification. Even if Mr. Ogles’s proposal dies on the vine, he will have surfaced a boisterous constitutional question. What we have drawn from the decades since the 22nd was ratified is that the question of whether a president in his second term can go to the voters for a third is best left to the voters — whether or not the president is named Trump.

Repeal the 22nd Amendment

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