Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution

Based on Wikipedia: Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution

The Amendment That Almost Wasn't Necessary

For over 150 years, American presidents voluntarily walked away from power after two terms. No law required it. No constitutional provision demanded it. They simply followed an unwritten rule established by George Washington in 1796.

Then Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke the tradition—not once, but twice—winning four consecutive presidential elections and serving twelve years in office before dying in 1945. Within two years, Congress had proposed an amendment to make sure it could never happen again.

The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1951, now limits presidents to two terms in office. But the story of how America arrived at this rule reveals something fascinating about the tension between democratic principles and the practical realities of governing.

What the Founders Actually Wanted

The men who drafted the Constitution in 1787 couldn't agree on presidential terms. Some, including Alexander Hamilton and James Madison—two of the most influential voices at the Constitutional Convention—actually supported lifetime tenure for presidents. They envisioned something closer to an elected monarch who would serve for life, provided they maintained good behavior.

George Mason of Virginia was horrified by this idea. He denounced lifetime presidential tenure as "tantamount to elective monarchy"—which, of course, was exactly what the young nation had just fought a revolutionary war to escape.

An early draft of the Constitution tried to split the difference: presidents would serve a single seven-year term and then be done. No reelection possible. One shot at leadership, then back to private life.

In the end, the Framers compromised on four-year terms with no limit on reelection. They deliberately left the door open for a popular president to serve indefinitely. The Constitution said nothing about term limits.

Washington Sets the Precedent

George Washington could have been president for life. He was so universally beloved that nobody would have seriously challenged him. But by 1796, after eight years in office, he was exhausted.

His health had begun to fail. Political opponents—yes, even Washington had them—had launched relentless attacks, especially after he signed the controversial Jay Treaty with Britain. More importantly, Washington felt he had accomplished what he'd set out to do: establish the new government on solid footing and prove that republican self-governance could actually work.

So he announced his retirement in his famous Farewell Address of September 1796. This wasn't just a goodbye speech. It was Washington deliberately stepping away from power when he didn't have to, creating a precedent that would last nearly 150 years.

Thomas Jefferson reinforced this tradition. As his second term wound down in 1807, he wrote prophetically about why presidential term limits mattered:

If some termination to the services of the chief magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally for years, will in fact, become for life; and history shows how easily that degenerates into an inheritance.

Jefferson understood something fundamental about human nature and political power. Given enough time, any position of authority tends to become permanent. And permanent power becomes hereditary power. He'd seen this pattern repeat throughout European history, and he wanted America to be different.

The Two-Term Tradition Takes Hold

After Washington and Jefferson, the two-term limit became an unwritten rule of American politics. James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson all served two terms and then stepped aside. The tradition was so strong that political scientists now call it a "vital check" against the accumulation of too much power by any single president or by the presidency itself.

Congress repeatedly tried to make this informal tradition into constitutional law during the early and mid-1800s. Various proposed amendments would have formally limited presidents to two terms. None of them passed. The tradition seemed strong enough on its own.

Interestingly, when the Southern states seceded and formed the Confederacy in 1861, they wrote their own constitution that limited the president to a single six-year term. No reelection at all. They apparently didn't trust even the two-term tradition to adequately restrain executive power.

The Presidents Who Tried for Three Terms

The two-term tradition wasn't absolute. Several presidents before Roosevelt tested its limits—and all of them failed.

Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War hero, seriously considered running for a third term in 1876 after winning reelection in 1872. Republican Party leaders discussed the possibility. But public opinion turned sharply negative, and Congress made its opposition clear. Grant backed down and left office after two terms.

He tried again in 1880, seeking the Republican nomination for what would have been a non-consecutive third term. He came close, leading on multiple ballots at the Republican National Convention, but ultimately lost the nomination to James A. Garfield by a narrow margin.

Theodore Roosevelt's situation was more complicated. He first became president in September 1901 after William McKinley was assassinated, just 194 days into McKinley's second term. Roosevelt then won his own full term in 1904. When 1908 came around, he declined to seek what would have been his second elected term—technically his third term overall if you counted the partial term he'd inherited.

But Roosevelt changed his mind. In 1912, he ran again as the Progressive Party candidate, splitting the Republican vote and handing the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson himself harbored third-term ambitions despite suffering a devastating stroke in 1919 that left him severely incapacitated. His advisers begged him to recognize that his health made another campaign impossible. Wilson ignored them and asked to have his name placed in nomination at the 1920 Democratic National Convention. Party leaders refused to support him, and the nomination went to James M. Cox instead.

Remarkably, Wilson contemplated running again in 1924, even developing a comeback strategy. But he had no support from anyone in his party. He died in February of that year, his third-term dreams unfulfilled.

FDR Breaks the Mold

Franklin Delano Roosevelt approached the 1940 Democratic National Convention playing an elaborate game. For months, he refused to say whether he would seek an unprecedented third term. His vice president, John Nance Garner, and his Postmaster General, James Farley, both announced their own candidacies for the Democratic nomination, apparently believing Roosevelt would step aside.

When the convention opened, Roosevelt sent a carefully crafted message. He said he would run only if "drafted" by the delegates, and that they were free to vote for whomever they pleased. Everyone understood what this really meant: Roosevelt wanted to be nominated, but he wanted it to look like the party's idea rather than his own ambition.

The delegates obliged. They nominated Roosevelt on the first ballot.

The third-term issue dominated the 1940 campaign. Republican nominee Wendell Willkie attacked the "open-ended presidential tenure" as dangerous to democracy. Democrats countered that with war raging in Europe—Hitler had already conquered France and was bombing Britain—America needed experienced leadership. Breaking with tradition was justified by extraordinary circumstances.

Roosevelt won decisively.

Four years later, facing Republican Thomas E. Dewey, Roosevelt ran for a fourth term. Dewey made the term-limits issue central to his campaign, calling sixteen years of one-man rule "the most dangerous threat to our freedom ever proposed." He also subtly questioned whether Roosevelt, then 62, had the health and stamina for another term.

Roosevelt campaigned vigorously enough to quell the health concerns and won again.

Eighty-Two Days

Roosevelt's fourth term lasted eighty-two days.

On April 12, 1945, while sitting for a portrait at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt complained of a terrible headache, then slumped forward unconscious. He died that afternoon of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He was 63 years old.

Vice President Harry S. Truman took the oath of office that evening. He reportedly asked Eleanor Roosevelt if there was anything he could do for her. She replied, "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now."

Truman inherited a presidency transformed by Roosevelt's twelve-year tenure. He also inherited a Republican Party determined to make sure no future president could accumulate that much power.

The Amendment Takes Shape

In the 1946 midterm elections, eighteen months after Roosevelt's death, Republicans swept into control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Many had campaigned explicitly on the issue of presidential term limits. When the new Congress convened in January 1947, they moved quickly.

The House of Representatives passed its proposed constitutional amendment on February 6, 1947, by a vote of 285 to 121. Notably, 47 Democrats joined the Republican majority in supporting the measure. The proposal limited future presidents to two four-year terms.

The Senate developed its own version with some interesting differences. Initially, senators wanted the amendment ratified by specially elected state conventions rather than state legislatures—the same method used to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment repealing Prohibition. They also proposed that anyone who had served more than 365 days in each of two terms would be barred from further presidential service.

Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio added an important clarification about vice presidents who succeed to the presidency. Under the final language, a vice president who takes over for a departed president can still be elected twice on their own—but only if they served less than two years of their predecessor's term. Serve more than two years of someone else's term, and you can only be elected once yourself.

The Senate passed its version 59 to 23 on March 12, with sixteen Democrats voting in favor. The House agreed to the Senate's changes on March 21, and the proposed amendment was sent to the states for ratification.

The Long Road to Ratification

Constitutional amendments require approval from three-fourths of the states—at the time, that meant 36 of the 48 states (Alaska and Hawaii weren't yet part of the Union). The Twenty-second Amendment set a seven-year deadline for ratification.

The first wave of ratifications came quickly. Within a month of Congress sending out the amendment, seventeen states had approved it. Maine and Michigan moved fastest, both ratifying on March 31, 1947, just ten days after Congress acted.

Then momentum slowed. After the initial burst, only five more states ratified during the rest of 1947 and 1948. The amendment languished for most of 1949 and 1950.

The final push came in early 1951. Eleven states ratified in January and February of that year. Minnesota became the decisive thirty-sixth state on February 27, 1951, completing the ratification process. The amendment had cleared its hurdle with three years and 343 days to spare before the seven-year deadline.

On March 1, 1951, the Administrator of General Services issued a certificate proclaiming the Twenty-second Amendment duly ratified and part of the Constitution.

Two states—Massachusetts and Oklahoma—formally rejected the amendment. Five others—Arizona, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Washington, and West Virginia—never voted on it at all.

The Grandfather Clause

The Twenty-second Amendment included a notable exception. It specifically exempted "any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress." That person was Harry Truman.

This exemption was more generous than it might seem. Truman had served nearly all of Roosevelt's unexpired 1945-1949 term—almost four full years. He'd then been elected to his own complete four-year term starting in 1949. Under the new amendment's rules, anyone else in his position would have been limited to one elected term. But because Truman was grandfathered in, he could theoretically have run again in 1952 for what would have been his third term in office.

Truman seriously considered it. But his job approval rating had cratered to around 27 percent—one of the lowest in presidential history at that point. When he performed poorly in the 1952 New Hampshire primary, he withdrew from the race. The Korean War, inflation, and corruption scandals in his administration had made him deeply unpopular.

So the first president who could have tested the new amendment's grandfather clause chose not to. The Twenty-second Amendment has applied to every president since.

Presidents Barred by the Amendment

Since 1951, six twice-elected presidents have been constitutionally prohibited from seeking a third term: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

Of these, Reagan and Clinton publicly expressed frustration with the limitation. Reagan was 77 when he left office in 1989 but remained popular enough that some supporters wished he could run again. Clinton, leaving office in 2001 at age 54 with strong approval ratings, openly joked about wanting to stick around.

Nixon's case is unusual. He was elected twice—in 1968 and 1972—so the Twenty-second Amendment would have barred him from a third term. But he resigned in August 1974 during the Watergate scandal, never completing his second term. The amendment became moot in his case.

Donald Trump presents an interesting constitutional situation. He was elected in 2016, lost his reelection bid in 2020, and then won again in 2024—making him the second president in American history to serve non-consecutive terms (Grover Cleveland was the first, serving from 1885-1889 and again from 1893-1897). Despite the gap between his terms, Trump has now been elected twice and is constitutionally barred from being elected again.

The Unanswered Question

The Twenty-second Amendment contains an ambiguity that has never been tested in court. Its language focuses specifically on being "elected" president. It says nothing about serving as president through other means.

The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, states that "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States." The constitutional qualifications for president are spelled out clearly: you must be at least 35 years old, a natural-born citizen, and a resident of the United States for at least fourteen years.

But is someone who has already served two terms "constitutionally ineligible" for the presidency? Or are they merely ineligible to be elected to the presidency?

The distinction matters enormously. If a two-term former president is completely ineligible for the office, they cannot serve as vice president, because the vice president must be able to assume the presidency. They also couldn't serve in any position in the presidential line of succession—Speaker of the House, President Pro Tempore of the Senate, Secretary of State, and so on.

But if the Twenty-second Amendment only bars election to the presidency, a two-term former president might legally be able to serve as vice president. They couldn't be elected president again, but they could potentially succeed to the presidency if the sitting president died, resigned, or was removed from office.

Legal scholars have debated this question for decades without reaching consensus. Some argue that the Twelfth Amendment's eligibility requirements encompass the Twenty-second Amendment's term limits, meaning a two-term president is completely barred from the vice presidency. Others contend that the Twelfth Amendment only addresses the original constitutional qualifications—age, citizenship, and residency—and has nothing to say about term limits.

The question has never been tested because no former two-term president has ever sought the vice presidency. Given the prestige and power of the presidency, it's hard to imagine why anyone would want to step down to the number two position. But constitutional ambiguities have a way of mattering eventually.

Was the Amendment Necessary?

Looking back, the Twenty-second Amendment raises a fundamental question about democracy: should voters be able to choose anyone they want as their leader, or should there be hard limits on how long someone can serve?

The case against term limits is straightforward. In a democracy, the people should be sovereign. If voters want to elect the same person three, four, or even ten times, that's their right. Term limits override the will of the majority and remove a choice that might otherwise be available.

Franklin Roosevelt's supporters made exactly this argument in 1940 and 1944. With war threatening, voters wanted experienced leadership. Who was Congress—or a constitutional amendment—to tell them they couldn't have it?

The case for term limits rests on Jefferson's warning about power becoming permanent and then hereditary. Even in a democracy, an incumbent president has enormous advantages: name recognition, media attention, control over government resources, the ability to distribute patronage and favors. The longer someone stays in office, the harder it becomes to dislodge them through normal electoral means.

Term limits guarantee turnover. They ensure fresh perspectives and new leadership. They prevent the presidency from becoming a de facto lifetime appointment for anyone popular or skilled enough to keep winning elections.

The 147-year gap between Washington's voluntary retirement and Roosevelt's break with tradition suggests the two-term norm was remarkably durable even without constitutional backing. But Roosevelt proved it could be broken. And once broken, there was no guarantee it would be restored.

The Twenty-second Amendment made certain that no future president could accumulate the power that comes from twelve or sixteen or twenty years in office. Whether that certainty is a protection of democracy or a limitation on it depends on how much you trust the voters—and how much you fear the concentration of power.

A Living Constitutional Question

The Twenty-second Amendment remains one of the more controversial provisions in the Constitution. Critics argue it's fundamentally anti-democratic. Supporters contend it's a vital safeguard.

What's clear is that it changed American politics permanently. Presidents now govern with a ticking clock. Second-term presidents are immediately labeled "lame ducks" because everyone knows they can't run again. This may reduce their political leverage in their final years in office.

Some political scientists argue this makes the presidency weaker than it should be. Others counter that it forces presidents to focus on their legacy rather than their reelection, potentially leading to bolder or more principled decisions in their second terms.

The amendment also shaped political dynasties. Without it, might a popular president have established something closer to the hereditary rule Jefferson feared? Or would the natural rhythms of democracy have prevented that anyway?

We'll never know. What we do know is that the United States made a choice in 1951: no matter how popular a president might be, no matter what crises the nation might face, no one gets more than two terms.

George Washington established that tradition voluntarily. Franklin Roosevelt broke it. And the American people, through their elected representatives and state legislatures, decided to write it into the Constitution so that it could never be broken again.