The US Constitution's Twenty-Second Amendment
Term Limits and the United States President
Nov 14, 2009
This tradition was followed by Thomas Jefferson and continued up until Franklin Roosevelt sought and was elected to a third term in 1940. Roosevelt’s third and fourth elections moved the Congress to propose official limits in line with previous tradition.
The Congress came to be dominated by the Republican Party while Harry Truman was president. The Republicans had been chafing under nearly sixteen years of Democratic presidents and wanted to see that it could not happen again.
Proposal and Passage of the 22nd Amendment
On March 21, 1947 the Congress sent to the States for ratification the following:
“Section 1. 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. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Section 2. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress.”
With the approval of the Minnesota legislature on Feb. 27, 1951, it became the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
President Truman not Affected
Harry S. Truman was president at the time the amendment was proposed and passed. As a result, he was the last president eligible to be elected to the presidency for more than two four-year terms.
Five Presidents since Truman became Ineligible for Election
Dwight Eisenhower was the first president affected by the 22nd Amendment. Elected in 1952 and 1956, Eisenhower was not eligible for election in 1960. President Eisenhower was not fond of the Amendment, and not because he wished to run for a third term.
Eisenhower’s dim view of the amendment arose from his feeling that it diminished the power of the president. The day a president is sworn in for his second term, everyone knows he is ineligible to run again. This knowledge has the effect of immediately making the president a “lame duck”, and dilutes his power.
Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both successfully concluded two four-year terms, becoming ineligible for re-election. Both remained fairly popular spurring short-lived movements to repeal the 22nd Amendment. Richard Nixon, though he did not complete his second term was ineligible, as he had been elected twice. George Bush had served two full terms, but there was little talk of repealing the 22nd Amendment as Bush neared the end of his service.
Twenty-Second Amendment vs. The Twelfth Amendment
Though no president has sought to become vice-president following two terms as president, there is some controversy as to if it would be possible, due to the restrictions of the Twelfth Amendment, which requires the vice-president to meet the constitutional eligibility requirements of being president as outlined in Article I. Some scholars contend the Twelfth Amendment relates to service as president and so the Twenty-Second Amendment’s restriction on election would not apply.
Though the issue has never arisen in recent times there was some suggestion that had Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination for president, Bill Clinton might have been a candidate for vice-president, testing the relationship of the two amendments.
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