Max Edmands

I was talking to an old friend online today and he referred me to an online governmental document that disturbed me deeply. Take a look:

A joint resolution to repeal the 22nd amendment to the United States Constitution: “Article– The 22nd amendment to the Constitution of the United States is Repealed.”

Upon more research, I discovered that there are two such amendments floating around. Here’s the text of the other one. It’s almost exactly the same as the first, except that it’s proposed by a different legislator.

Aren’t they frightening-looking? Don’t worry, neither amendment has been ratified. However, they’ve been open for debate in the Senate since a long time (2003), and have just been sitting there, not really doing anything. Nobody’s been talking about talking about them, especially on the mainstream media, but oddly enough, they aren’t immediately getting tossed aside either.

The 22nd amendment is, of course, the one that says that the President may not stay in office for more than two terms. A bit of history: this amendment was proposed in 1947, after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to office for four terms, which was a complete break in precedent. (With a few exceptions, presidents had only served one or two terms as a long-standing tradition that began with Washington.) Franklin Roosevelt was the president during the beginning of World War II, and his supporters said it would be a bad idea to switch presidents in the middle of a war. I’ll quote the rest from Wikipedia:

After Franklin Roosevelt’s death, many desired to establish a firm constitutional provision barring presidents from being elected more than twice. The rationale was a concern that without limits, the presidential position could become too similar to that of a benevolent dictator lasting not just four years but a lifetime, that the position could become too powerful and upset the separation of powers, and even so powerful that elections would become dispensable. Hence, the Twenty-second Amendment was adopted.

So what’s with the people who would like to get this amendment repealed again? The Carpetbagger Report, a rabidly liberal blog, (although for this issue, I’m not quite sure where party lines fall), has posted a somewhat intelligent argument supporting the amendments:

The presidency is the only federal office in the United States to have legal term limits. We can re-elect members of Congress to our hearts’ content, federal judges are there for life, we can even re-elect the same person to be vice president indefinitely. Yet voters are denied the chance to elect someone to the presidency more than twice.

With that in mind, maybe there’s something to this argument. To be sure, the idea of three (or more) terms for a President Reagan and/or Bush is horrifying to me, but then again, I could also be enjoying the 11th year of Bill Clinton’s presidency right now.

However compelling this argument may be, I think I have to disagree. In fact, I would definitely support term limits for all politicians in the country. (Especially the Congress. Strom Thurmond, for example, was a Senator who set an American record by serving for 49 years.)

Why? Because term limits limit the power that any single politican can wield over the citizens of our country. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that President Bush were able to run for the presidency indefinitely. Bush has already proven remarkably good at putting himself in the office. With his propaganda machine behind him, he would probably have no trouble staying in office term after term, until eventually we would no longer be left with a real democracy, but rather something quite akin to the enemy dictatorships in Iran and North Korea. The only difference is that we are the most powerful country in the world.