If the people desire to keep a certain individual as President for a long period of time, it is the people’s choice. Any provision that gets in the way of this choice to tyranny. However, with the knowledge that power tends to be abused as one gets a firmer grasp of it, I think the Constitution should be amended to forbid more than two CONSECUTIVE terms. So, in effect, a individual can serve for several eight-year terms as long as the people desire it. Limiting service to one eight year term for life is like banishing a rich person to live in the ghetto because he has lived in a mansion for over 30 years. It is simply undemocratic. Furthermore, having any part of Presidential service count for an individual who has succeeded to the presidency through premature removal of the previous President (i.e., if he took over as President before the halfway mark of his predecessor’s term, that term will count as one of his two alloted terms) is illogical. It is unfair to limit service to 6 years just because the previous President was assasinated.
The same post can be found here: http://discuss.princetonreview.com/forums/Thread.cfm?CFApp=3&Thread_ID=434925&mc=46
I wouldn’t mind electing Clinton again.
Hey, Jiang, you had your fun with Clinton. You are going to have to find a way to bribe the new president now.
Is it not bad enough now that a President has to sit in office for two lame duck months from the time of the election to the time when a new president is sworn in?
The only real choices, IMHO, are between the “old way” (pre-22nd Amendment) and the “new way” (post-22nd Amendment).
Eight years is a long time to spend as President of the United States. Can anyone actually think of any president where our nation would be better off with the president serving more than 8 years? Lincoln, perhaps. Washington, Jefferson? Perhaps to all.
However, I can think of none since Abraham Lincoln. I give Woodrow Wilson some credit. I would have like to have seen him in office for another 4 years, but his dwindling health combined with the lack of support he had probably would have turned those four years into four years of stagnation.
On the other hand, which presidents have been eligible to serve more than the 10 years allotted by the Constitution since the Amendment was passed? Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton are the only three. Which one would you elect for four more years?
In all three cases, I feel that the President had his chance and it was time to move on. I will not say that any of those three presidents were bad presidents. I will say, however, that there was no need to keep any of them around longer than necessary.
The President simply has too much power. The 22nd Amendment is a good amendment since it protects the rights of the people against a dominating (though charismatic) president. However, I am strictly against term limits for senators and representatives. It boggles my mind why a state would want to pull a congressman just when that congressman is gaining some clout for his state.
Look, I don’t want to sound mean or anything…
What the hell are you talking about?
The constitution mandates two 4 year terms. If a president takes over more than halfway through another presidents term they can run twice. Simple enough.
None of Reagan, Eisenhower or Clinton meet those criteria.
Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.
You answered your own question in an indirect way. If a president takes over in office more than halfway into another president’s term, he is allowed to run twice. That means the maximum time a president can serve is ten years.
The only presidents who ever had the opportunity to serve more than 10 had they been allowed to run again (8+4=12) are the presidents I named.
Perhaps further clarificication is needed. By the term “eligible”, I intended to mean that the president in question could have run for a third term had the 22nd Amendment allowed. That is where I feel I should have been more clear.
That still doesn’t make sense. The three named were specifically BARRED from running for a third term by the 22nd amendment.
I think what bjohn13 means is that those are the only three presidents who had served a full two terms since the 22nd was passed, and thus are the only ones who have been affected by it. But for the 22nd, they would have been able to run again, à la Roosevelt. Of the three who were affected by the 22nd, bjohn13 personally would not have liked to see any run again.
Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Bush père never completed two full terms, and LBJ declined to run for a second full term, so none of them were affected by the 22nd.
Whoops - my mistake (and also bjohn13’s): Nixon was also barred by the 22nd, since he was elected twice.
Thank you for the explanatin in your first post, NP. However, we were both correct in asserting that Nixon never completed his second term as per:
Well… there was FDR, of course. Just as a counterexample.
President F.D. Roosevelt served before the 22nd amendment was ratified, so he is not exactly a “counterexample.” In fact, his four terms largely prompted the amendment, which was ratified by a bipartisan coalition who agreed that the same individual holding so much power for so long was a bad thing.
Personally, I think that F.D. Roosevelt was one of the greatest presidents, but I still support the 22nd amendment. An incumbent president enjoys so many political advantages that he (or she, theoretically) can almost get reelected by inertia. Some voters will vote for reelecting an incumbent president just because he or she is more comfortable and familiar than any challenger. The presidents who have run for reelection since the 22nd amendment was ratified have all won their party’s nomination, and all but three (Ford, Carter, and Bush I) got reelected.
Too, while consistency at the top may be a good thing, it naturally prevents turnover–and thereby promotes stagnation and stifles innovation–throughout the executive branch. It excludes from executive power not only the opposition party, but the factions within the president’s own party who are out of the president’s favor. The presidency changing hands every so often circulates fresh leadership, new ideas, and innovative approaches throughout the government. The process works in the long run because more viewpoints and more styles get aired, and hopefully the better ones take. Letting the same individual hold the presidency for too long, and letting that individual’s appointees hold their jobs for just as long, squashes the impulses toward turnover and experimentation that ought to be a natural feature of the democratic process.
Were there any solid reasons for choosing 2 terms as the limit beyond it “feeling right”? How did they arrive at 2?
Two terms was the precedent set forth, dating all the way back to George Washington. There have only been two presidents in history who were actually nominated to run for a third term, and both are named Roosevelt.
Clinton, Clinton, Clinton.
I would feel so much safer right now…
I’ve always thought that having such short-term Presidents (eight years is a very short time) would make it hard to institute solid long-term plans or build solid relationships with other heads of state. And while I do recognize the difficulty presented by presidential inertia, of nine presidents since amendment 22, three didn’t get elected for a second term. That’s not as lopsided as I’d expected and I wonder how well that figure supports the inertia argument.
What of the OP’s suggestion that consecutive terms be limited, but not non-consecutive terms? That’d give the potential inertia a break but allow really good presidents another go. Nobody’s touched that part of the question yet.
You can’t really hang that ‘nominated’ thing on his party for TR. He effectively nominated himself as an independent candidate.
Depends on what you mean by “his” party. The Republican party, which had nominated Roosevelt for his full “second” term in 1904 (his first term was serving out the three and a half years left on the term to which the assassinated William McKinley had been reelected in 1900), and had nominated Roosevelt’s protege William Howard Taft in 1908, renominated Taft in 1912. Having lost the Republican nomination to his protege Taft, Roosevelt formed an insurgent third party, formally named the Progressive party but more commonly known as the “Bull Moose” party. The Bull Moose party won 88 electroral votes to the Republicans’ mere 8 votes, although both lost handily to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson.
So Roosevelt was certainly “nominated” by what was, at least in that election, a major party. Perhaps bjohn13 could have referred more precisely to the two presidents, both named Roosevelt, who actually won electoral votes for a third term.