Why did you put ‘foreign born’ in quotes? That phrase does not appear in the Constitution.
Article II, Section 1, provides in relevant part:
Persons born in the Canal Zone to US citizen parents are natural born citizens. Persons born in Germany to, for example, US military families, are natural born citizens.
Constitution online: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/constitution/toc.html
To quote the immortal Brad Hamilton: “Learn it. Know it. Live it.”
Injecting some rationality into this issue, I don’t think that a person will ever be President again for more than 8 years, absent a national emergency of Titanic proportions.
People in the US tend to think of a constitution as consisting only of the words on a piece of paper. This is because we have a written constitution. But people in England are well aware that a constitution (plan of government, see WWWebster’s, definition 5) contains more than the words written down at some point in time. In England they have no written document entitled “Constitution”; instead the constitution consists of various written agreements, acts of Parliament, traditions established through customary usage, etc.
The US Constitution originally did not contain a provision regarding term limits on Presidents. There was debate about such limits at the Convention, according to Madison’s notes, but it was decided better to leave the issue open. However, President Washington established effective term limits by quitting the office after only two terms. He would easily have been elected for a third term had he wanted it. It wasn’t until 1912 that anyone even attempted to be elected to a third term, and THAT person had assumed the office initially through death of a President (Roosevelt after McKinley’s death). So, if one was to look at our history, one would conclude that this country has had an unwritten rule limiting Presidents to two terms in office.
When FDR violated that rule in 1940, it was an issue in the campaign. An impending national emergency, combined with continued dislike of the Republican party by those who were still feeling or remembering the effects of the Great Depression, resulted in his re-election. But you will note that, once he died, the country tried to make certain that the aberration of a three term President never happened again.
Thus, although one can make a strong case for a person ‘legally’ becoming President a third time (that is, it isn’t barred by the written constitution or laws of the land), the practical constitution probably would prevent anyone from successfully accomplishing that feat.
DSYoungEsq-
Once again, I think your analysis is dead-on accurate. While it might be a technical possibility for a President to serve three terms, it just ain’t gonna happen.
By the way, sorry I lost my cool with you before.
I think that DSYoungEsq also did a great job of summarizing the situation, especially about the nature of the US Constitution.
I checked the CA Constitution about how term limits were expressed in that. The drafters of the term limit proposition decided not to leave any gray area.
It reads, “The governor may only serve two terms.”
Also all the other constitutional offices have the same limit in California expressed the same way.
And what would have been the problem with that? I really don’t understand what youse Americans have against democracy. If the electorate wants to re-elect someone to any given office for any length of time before they retire, die, or get democratically turfed, why not let them?
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