Dem
51
GOP
49
We presumed this was coming, and now we've seen the first actual right-wing article on the subject. There have probably been others already, but this is the first one we happened to stumble across. Peter Tonguette, writing for The American Conservative, says that the presidential term-limits imposed by the Twenty-second Amendment are unfair (please read that word in your whiniest possible voice) and should be done away with.
His angle here, which is ultimately kind of silly, is that it's probably OK to place a ban on more than two consecutive terms, but that the counter should reset once someone is out of office for a term. Ipso facto, when Trump is reelected in 2024 (this is taken as a given by Tonguette), then he should be allowed to stand for reelection in 2028.
If Tonguette had built his case around the fact that many states have constructed their term-limit laws in this way, then he might have part of a leg to stand on here. Or maybe not, since many states have done it the way the federal government does it. But in any case, his actual case is built around the absurd notion that when the Twenty-second was adopted, it was not foreseeable that a president might serve a term, be out of office for a term, and then return to the White House. Here it is in the author's own words:
Yet those who supported the amendment more than 70 years ago could not have foreseen the prospect of a one-term president who lost the office but who later regained it in a subsequent election. Grover Cleveland remains the only president to have successfully vaulted himself to the White House in nonconsecutive elections, in 1884 and in 1892. (Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909, also gave it a try by running as the Progressive Party standard-bearer in 1912.)
This is, if we may be blunt, monumentally stupid. First of all, every time an amendment to the Constitution has been adopted, the historical background had been examined painstakingly (these days, that job is done by the Congressional Research Service). Second, the Twenty-second Amendment was passed by Congress in 1947, when the median age of the members was about 55. That means that a sizable percentage of them were alive during Cleveland's second term, and some number had living memory of it. And pretty much all of them would have had living memory of Theodore Roosevelt, of course.
Naturally, Tonguette is just making the argument he needs to make in order to fit the circumstances of Donald Trump. If Trump had won in 2020, then Tonguette would undoubtedly be writing that in 1947, the leaders of the country simply couldn't have anticipated that a president might face crises in Europe and the Middle East at the same time, or that they couldn't possibly have guessed that men would regularly live into their 70s and 80s by the 21st century.
Beyond that, even someone who has drunk the Kool-Aid, as Tonguette has, doesn't really think the Twenty-second Amendment is going to be repealed. The bar for that is way too high, especially since at least 10 blue states would have to be on board. The real plan here is to normalize the idea that the Twenty-second is arbitrary, discriminatory, meaningless, etc., so that if the time comes that Trump wins reelection and then runs again, some segment of the public has been primed to accept that.
We are doubtful it will actually work, mind you. Yes, the insurrection clause appears to be toothless, but it was badly conceived, and is not well understood by the general public. The Twenty-second Amendment is one of the bedrocks of presidential elections, and everyone knows about it. That said, Trump has gotten away with a lot of things we did not think he would get away with, so we bring this to readers' attention, just in case. Oh, and remember that it was primarily Republicans, weary of a generation of uninterrupted Democratic rule, who were the drivers behind the Twenty-second Amendment. (Z)