I mean in terms of percentages.
And I don’t necessarily mean three full terms. 2.5 terms or 2.1 terms or anything nontrivially more than 2 (like, 10 minutes more doesn’t count) would qualify.
I mean in terms of percentages.
And I don’t necessarily mean three full terms. 2.5 terms or 2.1 terms or anything nontrivially more than 2 (like, 10 minutes more doesn’t count) would qualify.
In other words, you are asking whether Trump will find a way, legally or otherwise, to invalidate the POTUS term limit?
I agree he’ll certainly try, but unless things turn really poorly over the next four years, I’d say his chances of doing so are really, infinitesimally low.
And I will further predict that the closer he gets to doing so, the higher the risk that he’ll be a further assassination target.
The man is old af. 8 years is too long either way.
A third term really isn’t that much of a stretch. The 22nd Amendment was poorly drafted. Or perhaps more specifically, poorly drafted for our political era.
In order to approve a Trump third term, SCOTUS really wouldn’t need to come to an incredibly stretched conclusion. According to the letter of the Constitution, the requirements to be president such as term limits only apply to being elected president. Read from a strict literalist perspective, these requirements don’t apply to achieving the powers of Acting President through the line of succession.
So Trump could get a third term through being appointed Acting President through the line of presidential succession. He would have two flunkies run for President and Vice President. They run promising to immediately resign after being sworn in. MAGA arranges to have Trump appointed Speaker of the House. When the two flunkies resign, Trump would immediately become Acting President and serve the remainder of the flunky president’s term. In terms of actual powers, there is virtually no difference between being President or Acting President.
Again, it really wouldn’t require a super stretched interpretation of the Constitution for SCOTUS to rule this as a valid method. The writers of the 22nd Amendment wrote the amendment to say, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President…” They should have written it, “No person shall be elected to or hold the powers of the office of the President…” They didn’t consider that someone could try to deliberately become president in a way that doesn’t involve being elected president.
There’s never been case law on this, because no one has ever been vain enough to try and use this loophole to get a third term. But according to a strict reading of the Constitution, someone can absolutely serve a third term this way. Hell, this would also be a path for someone like Elon Musk, who is not a native-born citizen, to become president.