redstate.com By Jennifer Oliver O’Connell
One sleep and less than 24 hours until Monday, January 20, 2025, and the second inauguration of President-elect Donald J. Trump.
There was a time when presidential term limits were treated similarly to what Congress continues to do with the national debt and Social Security: kick the can down the road for the next Congress to deal with. Our first president, George Washington, made the choice to retire after eight years, and other presidents after him followed his lead by only serving two terms. It took 147 years before the two-term precedent set by Washington would be Constitutionally codified, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated four terms in office was the catalyst.
The National Archives’s “Amending America” project shows that presidential term limit motions appeared in Congress over the next 140 years regularly, with the first possible amendment submitted to Congress in 1788 by Thomas Tucker. In his 1897 report to the American Historical Association, Herman V. Ames listed 125 versions of presidential term limit amendments proposed to Congress between 1788 and 1896. “These were brought out chiefly by the fear that the President would use the patronage of his office to secure his reelection,” Ames said. “A large number of the amendments did not propose to change the term of the President as fixed by the Constitution, but to limit the number of times the same person could be chosen President.”
As per usual, the battle of presidential term limits was waged along party lines. One party submitted legislation to create an amendment when they feared that the opposing party’s president would overstay his welcome, and vice-versa. In a 1990 paper, Constitutional scholar Stephen W. Stathis explained:
Stathis writes that by the time the 80th Congress convened in January 1947, at least 200 presidential term limit amendments had been proposed in the House or Senate. But that Congress would be unique in its action to get the amendment to a full vote and the two-thirds majority needed to pass it, thereby sending it to the states for ratification.
The Republican Party had advocated for a presidential term limit amendment in its 1940 and 1944 convention platforms when first Wendell Willkie and then Thomas Dewey ran against Franklin Roosevelt. (The Democrats had added a presidential term limit amendment to its 1912 platform to oppose another Roosevelt—Theodore—when the former President sought a third, non-consecutive term.)
Perhaps it was the tailwinds from the closing war, or the zeitgeist flowed in the right direction, but the 80th Congress somehow found common ground…
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