Term Limits Are Still a Bad Idea.

The answer to fears of presidential tyranny has always been a virtuous citizenry.

A picture of FDR’s fourth inauguration. 1945.

Back during my student paper days, one of the many hot takes I churned out just in time for a newsletter was the case against term limits. To set the stage, it was September 2023 and every week a new piece about Dianne Feinstein’s staffers-turned-puppeteers was going viral. Mitch McConnell had just frozen in the middle of two press conferences on live TV.

And my tongue-in-cheek response to those stories was: “If it takes ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ing a literal corpse out onto the Senate floor to pass ‘Medicare for All’ or the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, sling that body over my shoulder.”¹

Senators being senile doesn’t matter, I argued. What’s important is how they vote and the U.S. just doesn’t need term limit band-aids. It needs a “strong party” system.

This year, term limits have been in the news for a very different reason. Past me’s arguments about the ability of parties to whip votes and the need for serious electoral reform still mostly ring true, but aren’t quite as relevant to this iteration of the discussion.

However, as a flexible—one might say reflexive—contrarian, I’m still perfectly prepared to explain why presidential term limits are a bad idea too.

Per popular history, the two term precedent was first set by George Washington who, in the words of Lin Manuel Miranda, wanted to “teach ‘em how to say goodbye.” Washington’s farewell address, however, framed his decision to retire from politics as a personal one, not a choice grounded in political principle.² Indeed, when term limits were actively considered during the Constitutional Convention, Washington had been an opponent.

In a 1788 letter to Lafayette, Washington explained his stance on the matter:

“There cannot, in my Judgment, be the least danger that the President will by any practicable intrigue ever be able to continue himself one moment in office, much less perpetuate himself in it—but in the last stage of corrupted morals and political depravity: and even then there is as much danger that any other species of domination would prevail. Though, when a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes.”

Fellow regular Liberal Currents contributor Pat Sobkowski argued recently that “Article II … has become a suicide pact.” I’ve written similar things myself, both for Liberal Currents and this Substack. So at first glance it just makes sense to put more checks on those power hungry enough to aspire to the presidency.

After all, the second Trump administration is plainly ruinous: simultaneously an authoritarian plot against America’s republican institutions and a massive grift. And much of the last four months was remarkably easy to see coming ahead of inauguration day. So I feel I can confidently state that a third Trump administration—were, God forbid, such a thing to become reality—would be even worse.

But, as the maxim goes, hard cases make bad law. People’s justifiable fear of a third Trump administration doesn’t mean antidemocratic checks on the ability of popular candidates to be re-elected are appropriate.

The public would do well to remember that the 22nd Amendment, which set the two term limit in Constitutional stone, was shepherded through the same Congress that passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman’s veto. The amendment was consciously intended to foreclose the possibility of a second Roosevelt and first seriously proposed as a campaign talking point by Republican candidate Thomas Dewey during the 1944 election cycle.³

More important than the 22nd Amendment’s specific history though is what Washington wrote in 1788: “when a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes.”

Our present two term limit evidently does not and cannot prevent the seizure of political power by far-right demagogues. Famously, when George Wallace was prevented from running for governor again by the Alabama Constitution’s restriction on consecutive terms, he simply had his wife run and win.

Term limits’ sole “merit” is that when the U.S. does have a genuinely popular president, like Reagan, Clinton, or Obama, the people are prevented from re-electing them as often as they may like. If we actually want to prevent tyrannies like those we have observed these past few months, the solution won’t be found in a technocratic, institutional mechanism like term limits.

Our salvation will have to be found in a recognition that as Alan Elrod, Jamelle Bouie, and, yes, myself have pointed out, civic virtue matters.

To quote Machiavelli, “these republics in which a free and pure government is maintained will not suffer any of their citizens either to be, or to live as gentlemen; but on the contrary, while preserving a strict equality among themselves, are bitterly hostile to all those gentlemen and lords who dwell in their neighbourhood; so that if by chance any of these fall into their hands, they put them to death, as the chief promoters of corruption and the origin of all disorders.”

---

I’ve written a few decent articles in the last couple weeks, so I’ll actually lead this section with those:

• A sizable critique of Ross Douthat’s interview of Jonathan Keeperman, also known as L0m3z, published by Liberal Currents

• A piece breaking the news that Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt hired Nate Hochman also in Liberal Currents

• And a breakdown of how Trump’s proposed budget cuts would affect Alabama for APR

And if you’re looking for other things to read, check out:

• Jon Lee Anderson interviewing Lula for the New Yorker

• Maia Mindel
  on gender and politics for Vox

• And Cornel Ban and Jacob Hasselbalch on indicative planning for Phenomenal World

1. Again, Feinstein was still alive when I wrote that. Admittedly an editor was forced to shoot down my earnest proposal to post the piece to the paper’s socials after she did pass.

2. The “precedent,” insomuch as it existed, was really set by Jefferson, who Washington notes had long supported term limits. In 1807, Jefferson wrote in a letter to the New Jersey legislature that “believing that a representative government, responsible at short periods of election, is that which produces the greatest sum of happiness to mankind, I feel it a duty to do no act which shall essentially impair that principle; and I should unwillingly be the person who, disregarding the sound precedent set by an illustrious predecessor, should furnish the first example of prolongation beyond the second term of office.”

3. Interestingly, progressive Senator Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette passed a resolution in 1928 that the Senate “commends observance of this [two term] precedent by the President.” In his floor speech, La Follette quoted Jefferson, Jackson, and Grant on the matter, while conceding that Washington had disagreed.