Why do the United States have presidential mandate limits? The story of the 22nd amendment

Only one person, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has never served more than two terms as president of the United States. It is for two reasons.

First, before the Roosevelt election to a third term in 1940, there was a long -standing American tradition which did not purge more than two mandates.

This tradition was established by the decisions of first presidents such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison not to ask for a third term. This tradition was then adopted by other presidents.

Second, after the death of Roosevelt in office in 1945 during his fourth term, the Congress and the people of the United States decided to transform the long-time tradition according to which the presidents should not serve more than two mandates into a part of the constitutional law.

This was done by the passage and ratification of the 22nd amendment, which became part of the American Constitution in 1951.

Franklin D. Roosevelt Funeral’s in Hyde Park, April 15, 1945. Photo via Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Public Domain Photographs

The intention is clear

The main provision of the 22nd amendment reads as follows: “No one will be elected to the president’s office more than twice, and no one who has held the post of president, or acted as president, for more than two years of a mandate to which another person was elected president will be elected to the president’s office more than once.”

The intention is clear. No one is supposed to serve more than two complete mandates as president.

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The only way someone can serve more than two mandates is if it has been used for less than two years in a previous quarter during which he was not elected president.

Here is an example: if a vice-president becomes president in the last year of a mandate because the president has died, this vice-president could still arise for two terms. But this exception still aims to prevent anyone from serving more than a total of 10 years as president.

It is necessary to understand why the tradition with two mandates was considered as important that it was transformed into constitutional law the first time that it has been violated.

Start tradition

Commentators often quote George Washington’s decision not to request a third term as president as establishing tradition with two terms. The political scientist and scholar of the terms limits Michael Korzi grants much more credit to the third president of the country, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson was frank in favor of two mandates tradition. As Korzi notes, it was partly because “Jefferson saw little distinction between a long -standing framework in an elective position and a hereditary monarch”. In other words, a mandate limitless president is too like a king.

Jefferson saw a president who was willing to break tradition with two mandates as being hungry for power, and he hoped that the American people would not eliminate such president. This led him to write in his autobiography in 1821 that “if a president agreed to be a candidate for a 3D election, I hope he would be rejected on this demonstration of ambitious points of view.”

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Jefferson also feared that without mandate limits, the presidents would remain in power for too long in their old age and after losing their ability to govern effectively. This led him to write that without mandate limits, there was a danger that “the indulgence and attachments of the people will keep a man in the chair after he became a Dotard”.

Subsequently, the presidents tended to respect tradition with two mandates. And in the few cases where the presidents decided to request a third term, their own parties would not give them the appointment.

This remained true until Roosevelt worked and won, both a third and a fourth term as president during the Second World War.

The 22nd amendment

Roosevelt’s violation of tradition with two mandates prompted Congress and states to transform tradition into a formal question of constitutional law.

A major concern motivating the amendment was the same who motivated Jefferson: preventing a president from becoming a king. Several members of the Congress identified the same concern during congress sessions in the 1940s.

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Senator Chapman Revercomb of Virginie-Western said that the power given to a president-free president “would be a specific step in the direction of the autocracy, whatever the name given to the office, whether the president, the king, the dictator, the emperor or any other title that the office may carry.

Likewise, Ohio’s Edward McCowen representative said the 22nd amendment would be “a big step towards prevention of a dictatorship or a totalitarian form of government of occurrence”.

And the representative John Jennings Jr. of Tennessee said that it is only in adoption of the 22nd amendment that “the people can be assured that we will never have a dictator in this country”.

The Congress adopted the 22nd amendment on March 21, 1947. It took less than four years at the three -quarters of the States to ratify the amendment, which became law on February 27, 1951.

Image of the 22nd amendment via the national archives. Public domain.

Tyrants and violations of terms of terms

In the 1980s, political scientist Juan Linz identified that presidential systems are less stable than other forms of democracy, such as parliamentary systems. The difference seems to be that the presidential systems concentrate more power in the hands of one person, the president. This facilitates the suppression of checks and balances on which democracies depend.

As academics noted, the violation of the limits of presidential terms and other methods of increasing executive power are a common form of democratic declines – a debilitation or elimination led by the state of political institutions which support a democracy.

Law professor Mila Verseeg and her colleagues have shown that in recent years, presidents around the world have used various tactics to try to violate the limits of the presidential term. These tactics include the attempt to modify the constitution of their country, trying to bring the courts to reinterpret the Constitution, to find a replacement leader that the former president can control once his duties and to try to delay the elections.

They note that most of the time, where the attempt of a president to violate the limits of the term fails, it is “because the attempt has encountered generalized popular resistance”. They conclude that this observation implies that “wide resistance movements” can be the best way to prevent violation of presidential term limits.

This article is republished from the conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.