Dead Presidents

XXII is recent and FDR’s four terms were the reasoning behind it, but the two-term limit is definitely binding and set in concrete with the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. 

I’ve mentioned numerous times that I am against a term-limit for the Presidency.  I believe that it was a knee-jerk reaction to the lengthy hold that Democrats had on the Presidency from 1933-1953.  It’s silly that the President is the only office-holder in the federal government who is term-limited.

At the time of the Amendment’s ratification and when FDR sought an unprecedented 3rd term in 1940, there was an argument made that the Founders intended for the President to serve only two terms.  That’s wrong.  Two terms were a tradition carried on after Washington served two terms and retired, but it wasn’t the intention of the Founders for the President to be term-limited.

How do I know that?  Well, they told us.

In The Federalist Papers (#69, to be exact), Alexander Hamilton laid out “The Real Character of the Executive” and as The Federalist Papers was an effort on the part of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay to support and promote the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, I think it’s safe to say that this is what the Founders were thinking when they created the Presidency.

Hamilton, as Publius, writes that the President “is to be elected for four years; and is to be re-eligible as often as the people of the United States shall think him worthy of their confidence”.  To opponents of the Constitution who worried about the power given to the President, Hamilton noted the differences between a President and the King of England.  While there was an unassailable “permanency” to the rule of the King, Hamilton pointed out that the President served at the behest of the people of the United States and that besides being voted out of office, the President also “would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.”

Once I get started on Presidential term limits, it’s difficult to get me to stop.  The fact is that these aren’t the words of a Constitutional interpreter or some Congressional Committee lawyer decades or centuries after Independence; these are the words of the men who literally wrote the Constitution and sold it to the people who created the United States, and I think it’s a shame that we didn’t listen to them.