“I’m Not Joking”: Trump Again Floats Running for Anti-Constitutional Third Term
"I'm not joking": Trump again floats running for anti-constitutional third term
Considering he claims to have won the 2020 election, by his own logic, he's already broken the constitution.
That said, there's a very real chance Trump could pull this off. Even without the extremely biased supreme court he's appointed, the text of the 22nd amendment is rather poorly drafted. Intent aside, someone strictly trying to interpret it only using the literal words of the amendment could very easily arrive at a conclusion that this end-around would be allowed. The entirety of the relevant portions:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice
That's it. Everything else is dealing with edge cases that don't apply here. Edge cases like "they were the VP, but the previous president died and they succeeded to the presidency" and "they were the president at the time the 22nd amendment was first passed". There's nothing to explicitly prevent someone who has been president for 2 terms then running as VP, and succeeding to the presidency by the VP resigning the day after inauguration.
A supreme court that has already shown itself to blatantly violate any reasonable interpretation of the constitution as written will absolutely have no qualms about violating the intent of the law when it's not explicitly written.
Except the 12th Amendment says:
But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
So the only possible way this could work is if Trump got elected to Congress, was voted Speaker of the House, then both the President and Vice President resigned. Which seems far fetched.
Ah, but you're not thinking like a fascist. See, the 12th says "constitutionally ineligible to the office", but the 22nd doesn't make a person ineligible to the office, only ineligible to be elected to the office.
