Why a Republican Congress Wrote the 22nd Amendment After Four Terms of FDR

Quick quiz, and no peeking. Which amendment to the Constitution did the Republican Party write, pass through Congress, and carry across the finish line in the states? Not the 13th, the 14th or the 15th, although those were Republican work too. I mean the one most people cannot place by number, the one that comes up at every family gathering the moment somebody says the words "third term." The 22nd Amendment. It is a Republican product, start to finish, and nobody seems to know it.

That matters, because the arguments about it tend to go in circles. One side treats it as a sacred text. The other treats it as a technicality. Both skip the history, and the history is what tells you what the thing was built to do, what it says, and what it leaves alone. So let me explain how an amendment gets born out of a four-term presidency, and then walk through the actual words, because the words are shorter than the arguments about them.

The tradition before the law

For a century and a half the two-term limit was not law. It was a habit, and it started with George Washington. He could have been president for life, and many Americans would have been delighted. In September 1796 he published his Farewell Address, announced that he would not seek a third term, and set an example that his successors treated as binding. Thomas Jefferson, at the end of his second term in 1809, declined to run again and made the reason explicit: a president who stays too long risks turning an office into an inheritance. For more than a hundred years, no president broke the habit.

Some tried. Ulysses Grant, after leaving office in 1877, was boosted for a third term at the 1880 Republican convention, and the delegates declined to give it to him. Theodore Roosevelt, who had spent almost eight years in the White House by the time he left in 1909, ran again in 1912 as a third-party candidate, and the voters did not return him to the White House. The tradition held not because the Constitution said so, but because the voters and the party conventions kept saying no.

Remember the thing worth remembering here: the original Constitution had no limit at all. At the Philadelphia Convention the delegates considered several ideas about how long a president should serve, and they settled on a four-year term with no restriction on re-election. Alexander Hamilton defended that choice in Federalist No. 72. His argument, in plain terms, was that the prospect of re-election is an incentive to good behavior, and that shutting a proven leader out of office deprives the country of experience at the very moment it may need it most. You can disagree with Hamilton, and many conservatives do, but notice that he was making a conservative argument about incentives. Keep it in mind. We will return to it.

What FDR did to the habit

Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and again in 1936, which was ordinary. In 1940, with war in Europe and the Depression not yet fully behind the country, he ran for a third time, and won, defeating the Republican nominee Wendell Willkie. In 1944, with the nation at war on two oceans, he ran for a fourth time and won again, defeating Thomas Dewey. He died on April 12, 1945, only a few weeks into that fourth term.

Defenders of those decisions point to the emergency, and the emergency was real. Nobody serious argues that the country should have changed commander in chief in 1944 as a matter of principle, or that Dewey would have been a villain. But the effect was undeniable. The unwritten rule had been broken twice, by a man who, as it turned out, would serve until his death. After that, the question stopped being whether a president might stay too long. It became whether the country wanted to depend on a habit that one popular president had already overridden.

Here is the structure of the argument as the amendment's supporters saw it:

1. A free republic is safer when power changes hands on a schedule the voters can predict.
2. A tradition is only as strong as the next popular president's willingness to honor it.
3. The tradition had already failed once, and the example would now be available to every future leader with a crisis and a following.
4. Therefore the tradition should become law, and it should be beyond the reach of any single administration or party to change.

That last point is why it had to be an amendment and not a statute. A statute can be repealed by the next Congress. An amendment requires two-thirds of each chamber and three-fourths of the states. If you want to understand how high that bar is, Article V Explained, and the Amendment That Took More Than 200 Years walks through the machinery.

The 80th Congress does the work

In November 1946 voters gave Republicans control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in sixteen years, after a campaign built on one blunt question: had enough? The 80th Congress convened in January 1947, and among its first orders of business was a resolution to limit the presidency to two terms.

The House passed the resolution in February 1947. The Senate passed its version in March, and the two chambers sent the final text to the states on March 21, 1947. Congress attached a condition: the states had seven years to ratify. They did not need the whole seven. The thirty-sixth state, Minnesota, ratified on February 27, 1951, and with forty-eight states in the Union at the time, thirty-six was the three-fourths needed. The process took just under four years from start to finish. The 22nd Amendment was officially part of the Constitution.

I want to underline one thing about the politics, because it complicates the tidy version. The amendment was a Republican-led project, and it carried a whiff of settling a score with a dead president. Critics said so then, and they were not entirely wrong. Many of its backers were happy to put a permanent seal on the New Deal era. But a motive and a merit are different things. The amendment can be motivated by the experience of 1940 and 1944 and still be a sound answer to a real problem, and the states that ratified it, a large number of which were not Republican-run, evidently thought it was.

The exact text

Now to the part that gets skipped. Section 1 of the 22nd Amendment reads:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

Section 2 is the ratification clause, the seven-year deadline. That is all. Let me break Section 1 into the four rules it contains.

• The two-election rule. No person shall be elected president more than twice. The verb is elected. The limit counts elections, not years.
• The succession rule. If a vice president takes over and serves more than two years of a term to which someone else was elected, that person can then be elected only once. The ceiling for a president who succeeds mid-term is therefore ten years: up to two years of the predecessor's term, plus two elected terms. The ten-year ceiling is the amendment's own arithmetic, and you can verify it by reading the clause.
• The Truman exemption. The amendment did not apply to the person holding the office when it was proposed. That was Harry Truman, a Democrat. Congress chose not to bar him, and he did not run in 1952. The man who would be the first to live under the limit was Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, elected in 1952 and re-elected in 1956.
• The remainder-of-term rule. Nobody who happens to hold the office when the amendment becomes operative is kicked out of it.

Those are the rules. Notice what the text does not say. It does not say anything about "consecutive" terms. It does not say anything about the vice presidency. It does not say anything about what happens if someone runs after a gap. The words "more than twice" apply to election, with no qualifier about whether the terms follow one another. Anyone who tells you the limit applies only to consecutive terms is adding a word the text does not contain.

Where the arguments get loose

This is where you will hear the clever theories. A common one says a two-term president could return as vice president and then succeed to the presidency. Another says an arrangement could be made where the president steps aside and a successor immediately resigns. I am not going to rule on every hypothetical, because they are hypotheticals, and the courts have never had to decide them. But I will tell you where to look.

The 12th Amendment says that no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice President. The straightforward reading is that a twice-elected president, being barred from election to the presidency, is barred from being elected vice president as well. A lawyer who wants to argue otherwise will say the 22nd Amendment limits only election to the presidency, not service in it. A lawyer who wants to argue the other way will say the whole point of the amendment would be gutted. Both arguments exist. Neither has been tested in court. When someone tells you the answer is obvious in either direction, you are listening to a person who has not read the two texts side by side.

That is my own view, and I will state it as a view: the plain reading of the text and the plain purpose of the amendment point the same way. A rule written to keep one person from holding the office for more than two elected terms should be read to mean exactly that. If a future movement wants a different rule, the constitutional way to get it is the same way the rule was written: Article V, two-thirds of Congress, three-fourths of the states. A president who wants more time is not entitled to a clever reading. He is entitled to ask the country to amend the Constitution. For the whole document in order, see A Walkthrough of the Constitution You Can Finish in One Evening, and for the party's own rules on who may run, the elections page.

Does a limit help or hurt voters?

Here is the steelman for the other side, and it deserves its day. The argument against the amendment goes like this. In a free country, the voters should be able to choose whomever they like. A term limit tells a majority that it may not re-elect a leader it trusts. It also makes every second-term president a lame duck, weaker in dealing with Congress and foreign governments, because everyone knows the clock is running. Hamilton's argument in Federalist No. 72 is the intellectual ancestor of that view, and several modern conservatives have found it persuasive enough to call for repeal.

And here is the case for it, which I find stronger.

1. Power attracts power. The longer anyone holds an office with the enormous reach of the presidency, the more the machinery of government, the appointments, the pardons, the regulators, bends around him. The voters are still free to choose, but they are choosing against an incumbent with advantages no challenger can match.
2. Habit beat law once. The record from Washington to Franklin Roosevelt shows that a tradition lasts only as long as it is honored, and that the one time it was not honored, the consequences were a presidency that ended only with the man's death.
3. The lame-duck cost is overstated. Second-term presidents have signed treaties, vetoed bills, won and lost budget fights, and appointed judges. Congress is still there, with its own calendar, and the presidency does not become powerless in its last two years.
4. Rotation is a conservative value. The founders distrusted permanent rulers. A rule that guarantees turnover protects ordinary citizens from the temptation to treat a president as a king, and it protects the president's own party from the temptation to build everything around one man.

My verdict: the amendment's costs are real but small, and its protection is large. It is the rare constitutional change that conservatives and constitutionalists of every stripe can defend on first principles. It was written by Republicans because Republicans had just watched what an unwritten limit was worth. For how presidential power is checked in other ways, read FDR Tried to Pack the Supreme Court in 1937 and His Own Party Said No and The New Deal Coalition and the Twenty Years the GOP Spent in the Wilderness, which cover the years that produced it.

What it means for the rest of us

The 22nd Amendment is not, in itself, a statement about any one president. It applies to every one of them, of either party, for as long as it remains in the Constitution. Donald Trump is the sitting president, and the Constitution as written limits any president to two elections. Whatever you think of him, the proper way to talk about his future or anyone else's is to start with the text and then follow the amendment process if you want the text changed. Anything else is a slogan.

It is also worth noticing that the amendment concerns a national office and says nothing about governors or Congress. Many states limit their governors. No federal rule limits senators or representatives, and Republicans, like Democrats, have gone back and forth on whether they should. That is a separate argument, and a good one. For now, the thing to remember is that when your cousin says "a president can't be re-elected after two terms because it's tradition," you can tell him it is not tradition any more. It is the 22nd Amendment, and a Republican Congress wrote it.

The bottom line

• The 22nd Amendment is a Republican achievement: proposed by the 80th Congress in March 1947 and ratified when Minnesota became the thirty-sixth state on February 27, 1951.
• Read the text yourself. It limits how many times a person can be elected president, with a separate rule for vice presidents who succeed. It does not use the word "consecutive."
• The theories about workarounds have never been tested in court. If a theory depends on reading a word out of the text, be suspicious of it.
• If you want a different rule, the Constitution already tells you how: Article V. Say that to anyone, on either side, who wants to skip it.
• Washington and Jefferson set the example, and FDR proved a custom is not enough. Teach your kids the difference between a tradition and a law.