President Donald Trump has said there is a method by which he might return to serve a third term as president — and the New York Times Editorial Board might have figured it out..
The board recalled the words of Congressman John Jennings Jr. (R-TN), uttered in 1947. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fourth term election, Jennings was promoting legislation which would limit a president to two sessions in office.
While advocating for what is now the 22nd Amendment, Jennings warned that a president “backed by a ‘subservient Congress’ and a compliant Supreme Court' could ‘sweep aside and overthrow the safeguards of the Constitution,’" the Times wrote.
Jennings left office in 1951 and, later that year, the country ratified the 22nd Amendment.
Today, the Times echoed Jennings' warning, applying his words to Trump: “President Trump is a man of vaulting ambition,” the board wrote. “Congress is largely subservient to his agenda. And he keeps mentioning the idea of a third term.”
The 22nd Amendment says no person shall be “elected” to the office of president more than twice. However, the Times points out, it doesn’t say that no president shall serve more than twice.
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This opens up the question — can a term-limited president run as a vice president and then be handed the Oval Office when his running mate resigns?
“I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we’ve got to figure something else out,’” Trump said after being re-elected in November.
In March, Trump noted that he was “not joking” and that “there are methods which you could do it.”
But the Times concluded with the belief that the 22nd amendment loophole could blocked by “another amendment — the 12th — [that] appears to rule out that possibility.”
The board's final sentence declares that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice president of the United States.”
“Together, the two amendments make clear that Mr. Trump’s time in office cannot extend beyond his current term,” the Times wrote. “Mr. Trump’s third-term fantasizing is more dangerous than this response suggests, and it deserves more forceful pushback.”