OPINION:
As the presidential primary campaign heats up this month, it’s ironic that late February also marks the 65th anniversary of the ratification of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution limiting the president to two terms in office. No amendment — not even the infamous 16th, or income tax, Amendment — took so long to be ratified by the requisite number of states. Passed by Congress on March 21, 1947, the measure didn’t become the law of the land until Feb. 27, 1951.
And for good reason.
When political parties emerged in the early 1800s, no party wanted to put a limit on presidential service so long as it was riding high in occupying the White House. To be sure, George Washington set a precedent of sorts by serving no more than two terms. But parties chomped at the electoral bit, trying to find a way to stay in presidential power, with Thomas Jefferson and succeeding chief executives James Madison and James Monroe as close allies, as well as Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren.
Early in the 20th century, Republicans had a lock on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Only one Democrat, Grover Cleveland, was elected during the lengthy time period from Abraham Lincoln’s tenure to 1912. Little wonder that Democrats in their party nominating convention in 1896 proposed a plank prohibiting a presidential third term. Still, they had no luck in garnering the top spot in the land.
So in 1912, consigned to the reality that they would probably lose again, they proposed “a single Presidential term, and to that end urge the adoption of an amendment to the Constitution and we pledge the candidates of this Convention to this principle.”
Oops.
Then the 1912 race developed into a three-way contest, with the Republican Party split, the main faction supporting President William Howard Taft for re-election and the liberal renegades backing former chief executive Theodore Roosevelt. The Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, the relatively unknown governor of New Jersey and former Princeton University president and professor, was thus a shoo-in.
Once in office, Wilson and most Democrats — except for perennial candidate William Jennings Bryan, who opposed Wilson’s preparedness efforts with respect to World War I — were not about to let convention pledges do them in. So the president permitted his name to be placed in the first presidential primary in Ohio in the spring of 1916. He was also the featured speaker at the Common Counsel Club Banquet in Washington on April 13, usually referred to as the Jefferson Day dinner, with the Washington Herald the next day headlining that the president’s “Fight for New Term is Commenced.” More than 800 leading Democrats used the occasion to extol how much the Wilson administration had adhered to the platform planks.
Not surprisingly, nary a word was directed toward the one-term presidential commitment, and Wilson’s speech was conspicuous for the necessity for Democrats under his leadership to continue progress for the nation in the next four years, as well as for its high-minded blather: “We are not partisans,” he said, “between the rich and the poor; as between the employer and employee, but that, if it be possible, we are partisans of both, and would, if we could in our thinking, draw them together to see the interests of the country in the same terms and express them in the same concerted purposes.”
And Wilson went on to capture the nomination and defeat Republican Charles Evans Hughes in a close election.
Also not surprisingly, after Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented four terms, Republicans were in the forefront of the movement for the 22nd Amendment, which never struck much of a chord with the people at large. And the vote for the measure in the Republican-controlled 80th Congress just met the required two-thirds constitutional threshold, 285-121 in the House, 59-23 in the Senate.
If the amendment set a record for the lengthy time it took to get ratified, it’s also the only one about which both houses of Congress in recent years have had second thoughts, with numerous proposals — from both parties — to get it repealed. But the efforts never got out of committee onto the floor for a vote.
• Thomas V. DiBacco is professor emeritus at American University.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.