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Shkruar nga Mark Satta 
From tradition to imposition: Here's why the presidency was limited by the Constitution to only 2 terms...
Only one person, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has ever served more than two terms as president of the United States. And that's for two reasons. First, before his election to a third term in 1940, there was a long tradition of presidents not serving more than two terms.
This tradition was created by the decisions of early US presidents such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison not to seek a third term. This tradition was later adopted by other presidents.
Second, when Roosevelt died in office in 1945 during his fourth term, Congress and the people of the United States decided to restore the long-standing tradition that presidents should serve no more than two terms, as part of the Constitution.
This was done through the passage and ratification of the 22nd Amendment, which became part of the U.S. Constitution in 1951. The main provision of this amendment states: “No person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President or acted as such for more than two years in a term in which another person has been elected President, shall be elected to the office of President more than once.”
The intent is clear. No one is supposed to serve more than two full terms as president. The only way someone can serve more than two terms is if they served less than two years in a previous term in which they were not elected president.
Here's an example: If a vice president becomes president during the last year of a term because the president dies, the former can run again for two terms. But this exception still aims to prevent anyone from serving more than 10 years as president.
It's worth understanding why the tradition was considered so important. Scholars often cite George Washington's decision not to seek a third term as president as the founder of the two-term tradition. Political scientist and presidential term limits scholar Michael Korzi gives much more credit to the third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was openly in favor of the two-term tradition. As Korzi points out, this is because he saw no great difference between a long-term government and a monarch who holds hereditary power. So a president with unlimited terms is very similar to a king. Jefferson predicted that there would be presidents willing to break the two-term tradition, out of hunger for power, and he hoped that the American people would not elect such a president. This prompted him to write in his 1821 autobiography that “if a president were to accept a third term, I believe he would be rejected.”
Jefferson also worried that without term limits, presidents would stay in office long into old age, even after they had lost their ability to govern effectively. So from that time on, presidents tended to stick to the two-term tradition.
And on the few occasions when presidents decided to seek a third term, their parties would not give them the nomination. This remained true until Roosevelt ran for and won his third and fourth terms as president during World War II.
The breach of tradition forced Congress and the states to turn the tradition into an official matter of constitutional law. A major concern that motivated the 22nd Amendment was the same one that had motivated Jefferson: to prevent a president from becoming king.
Many members of Congress identified the same concern during hearings in the 1940s. Senator Chapman Revercomb of West Virginia declared that the power given to a president without term limits “would be a step toward autocracy, regardless of the name given to the office, whether president, king, dictator, emperor, or whatever title it may bear.”
Similarly, Congressman Edward McCowen of Ohio said that the 22nd Amendment would be “a great step toward preventing the establishment of a dictatorship or any totalitarian form of government.” Tennessee Congressman John Jennings Jr. also stated that only by passing the 22nd Amendment “can the people be assured that we will never have a dictator in the United States.”
Congress passed the 22nd Amendment on March 21, 1947. It took less than four years for the required three-quarters of the states to ratify it. The amendment became law on February 27, 1951. In the 1980s, political scientist Juan Linz concluded that presidential systems are less stable than other forms of democracy, such as parliamentary systems. The difference is that presidential systems concentrate more power in the hands of a single person, the president. And that makes it easier to dismantle the checks and balances on which democracies depend. As scholars have noted, violating presidential term limits and other methods of increasing executive power are a common form of backwardness relative to democratic norms.
Law professor Mila Versteeg and her colleagues have shown that in recent years presidents around the globe have used various tactics in attempts to circumvent presidential term limits.
These tactics include trying to change their country's constitution, trying to force the courts to reinterpret the constitution, finding a replacement leader whom the former president can control once he leaves office, and trying to postpone elections.
They note that in most cases, a president's attempt to violate term limits has failed "because it has encountered widespread popular resistance."
They conclude that this discovery implies that "broad resistance movements" may be the best means to prevent the violation of presidential term limits./ In Albanian: Pamphlet
Note: Mark Satta, associate professor of philosophy and jurisprudence at Wayne State University.
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