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There’s been a deluge of stories about President Donald Trump’s latest musings about serving a third term in the White House. Is he actually serious about breaking yet another norm? Or is he just trying to make himself seem less like a lame duck?
Here’s the thing: You can’t know. But you can know the history and the law behind the two-term-only rule for U.S. presidents.
As legal scholar Mark Satta writes, the respected custom had strong support from Thomas Jefferson.
“Jefferson saw a president who was willing to break the two-term tradition as power hungry, and he hoped that the American people would not elect such a president,” he writes. “And in the few cases where presidents decided to seek a third term, their own parties would not give them the nomination.”
Until Franklin D. Roosevelt, that is. Roosevelt’s breaking of the unwritten rule – he was elected to four terms – “prompted Congress and the states to turn the tradition into a formal matter of constitutional law,” with the two-term limit enshrined in the 22nd Amendment, passed by Congress in 1947 and ratified by three-quarters of the states by 1951.
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