Only one person, Franklin Delano Roosevelt has ever given more than two tenure as the President of the United States. This is for two reasons.
First, for the third term in 1940, there was a long -time American tradition before the election of Roosevelt that the presidents did not serve more than two conditions.
The tradition was established by the decisions of early presidents such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who were not looking for a third term. This tradition was later adopted by other presidents.
Second, after Roosevelt died of post in 1945 during his fourth term, the Congress and the United States decided to launch a long -standing tradition that the President should not serve more than two conditions in one part of the constitutional law.
This was done through the route and perception of the 22nd amendment, which became part of the US Constitution in 1951.
Intention is clear
The main provision of the 22nd amendment is as follows: “No person will be selected more than twice for the President’s office, and any person who has held the post of President, or has not served as President, will be elected more than once in the President’s office.”
The intention is clear. No one is going to serve more than two full conditions as President.
The only way that one can serve more than two conditions is that they serve in less than two years in the previous term in which he was not elected President.
Here is an example: If a vice -president becomes president during the final year of a word, as the President dies, the Vice President can still run for two terms. But this exception is still preventing anyone from serving more than 10 years as President.
It is worth understanding why the two-term tradition was considered so important that it was converted into a constitutional law, when it was first violated.
Tradition
Commentator often cites George Washington’s decision not to seek the third term as the President as the establishment of a two-term tradition. Michael Korji, a political scientist and term limit scholar, gave a lot of credit to the country’s third President, Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was vocal in favor of the two-term tradition. As the Korji note, it was in part, because “Jefferson saw a slight difference between an alternative position and a long -serving executive in a hereditary emperor.” In other words, a president without a limit is much more like a king.
Jefferson saw a President who was ready to break the two-term tradition as power-land, and he hoped that American people would not choose such a President. This inspired him to write in his autobiography in 1821 that “the President should agree to be a candidate for the 3D election, believing that he would be rejected by this performance of ambitious ideas.”
Jefferson also worried that without the range of the period, the President would stay in the office for a very long time in his old age and later he had lost his ability to rule effectively. This inspired him to write that without the term limit, there was a danger that “people’s indulgence and attachment would place a man on the chair when he becomes a dotard.”
Subsequently, the presidents followed the two-term tradition. And in some cases where the presidents decided to find a third term, their own parties would not nominate them.
This was true until Roosevelt won one -third and fourth term as President during World War II, and won.
22nd Amendment
A violation of the two-period tradition of Roosevelt inspired the Congress and the states to convert the tradition into a formal case of constitutional law.
A major concern that inspired the amendment was the one that inspired Jefferson: to prevent a President from becoming a king. Many members of the Congress identified the same concern during the Congress session in the 1940s.
Sen Chapman Revercomb of West Virginia said that the power given to a president without any working person “would be a certain step towards the autocracy, whether it is named, whether it is President, Raja, Dictator, Emperor, or whatever it is.”
Similarly, Ohio’s rape Edward McCowen said that the 22nd amendment would “be a great step towards preventing a dictatorship or some totalitarian form of the government.”
And Tennessy’s rape John Jennings Junior said that by adopting only the 22nd amendment, can people be assured that we will not have a dictator in this land. “
On March 21, 1947, the Congress passed the 22nd amendment. To confirm the amendment, it took less than four years to the required three-fourths of the states, which became a law on February 27, 1951.
Tyrannical and duration limit violations
In the 1980s, political scientist Juan Linz identified that the presidential system is less stable than other forms of democracy, such as parliamentary system. The difference seems to be that the President’s system focuses more power in the hands of a person, the President. This makes it easier to remove the check and balance which depends on it.
As mentioned by scholars, violation of the limit of presidential and executive power is a common form of democratic backsliding-a state-led weakness or elimination of political institutions that maintain democracy.
The professor of the law found Vastying and their colleagues have shown that in recent years the presidents around the world have used various strategies to try to violate the borders of the presidential. In these strategy, trying to amend the constitution of our country, trying to achieve courts to re -interpret the constitution, trying to find a replacement leader who can control the former presidential post and try to delay elections.
They note that most of the time when an attempt to violate a President’s duration limit fails, this “because the effort faces wide popular resistance.” They conclude that this discovery means that “comprehensive resistance movement” can be the best means to prevent violation of the presidential range.
(Associate Professor of Mark Satta, Philosophy and Law, Wayne State University)
(This article is reinstated by interaction under a creative Commons license. Read the original article.)
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is published by a syndicated feed.)
