If Trump Is Not Impeached Can He Serve a Third Term

The sick-considered impeachment efforts against President Donald Trump have seriously interfered with his first term as president. Thus, argues constitutional scholar William Mattox in The Wall Street Journal, if acquitted, Trump should be eligible for a 3rd term, notwithstanding the ii-term limit in the 22nd Amendment.

Mattox deploys a sports analogy: "In the National Football League, teams can challenge a call on the field — but at that place'south a chance. If instant replay doesn't merit overturning the call, the challenging team loses one of its three timeouts. That discourages frivolous challenges and keeps the game flowing, while also providing a mode to reverse egregious errors."

Hence, a third term for the president: "That would let him to make up for the time lost advancing the calendar that voters elected him to enact. It would preserve impeachment for genuine offenses only discourage its use for disputed ones and for mere politics. Absent such an subpoena, and in an era when regime is divided more often than not, impeachment seems probable to become an increasingly common ways of opposition."

Tertiary terms, no amendment needed?

Mattox'due south proposal sounds radical, but actually, he'south a piker: He wants to attain this shift via a constitutional subpoena. How erstwhile-fashioned. Doesn't he know that the Constitution is a living affair, made to grow and change with the times? Over the past century, we have made dramatic changes in the extent of federal power, the redistricting of state legislatures, the constitutionalization of ballgame and contraception and gay marriage, and much, much more, all without the tedious necessity of an actual amendment to the Constitution.

Only wait, yous might ask — if a "living, breathing Constitution" would allow a third term after acquittal on impeachment, why didn't President Bill Clinton, who was impeached just not removed over lying in a degradation, become a third term? Simple enough: He didn't try. And maybe the Constitution hadn't lived and breathed quite plenty nevertheless, in those primitive days of the 1990s.

However, had Clinton done so, he probably could have establish some left-leaning legal scholars to argue in his favor. (A few names come to heed right away.) But, of course, if Trump were eligible for a third term in 2024, then I suppose Bill would perforce be as well, setting upwardly — as Mattox notes — the possibility of some other Trump/Clinton contest in 2024, merely with a different Clinton. (Hey, it'due south not crazy: Bill Clinton is a scrap younger than Trump, and both are younger than Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders).

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And past 2024, when the result becomes ripe, Trump stands a good chance of having nominated a supermajority of the Supreme Courtroom. Equally old Justice William Brennan famously said, "Five votes tin do anything around here."

Punish political frivolity at the polls

OK, actually, a 3rd term is an atrocious idea, with or without impeachment, and my suggestion that we get in that location without an amendment is even more natural language-in-cheek than Mattox's suggestion that we get there with one.

Such a system would encourage all sorts of gaming, commencement with pro-forma impeachments and acquittals to fix up a tertiary term and going on from in that location. And luckily for Trump haters, he has appointed standard originalist justices, not the "living Constitution" jurists favored by the left. (Something for which, as I've suggested earlier, the left should exist grateful.) I doubt at that place would be a unmarried vote on the court in support of a third term, even if Trump fills seven seats.

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But Mattox does take a larger point. One reason our politics — and most peculiarly our congressional politics — are and then frivolous is that there are few consequences for frivolity. There should be a cost. I'd support a constitutional amendment to fix that, but there's zero gamble that an amendment to make Congress more accountable would pass Congress these days.

What's left? Every bit a seasoned lobbyist once told me a long time ago, the way you punish a political leader is "y'all beat 'em." What fiddling accountability exists for Congress at present takes place at the polls. Voters need to brand sure information technology happens.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of "The New Schoolhouse: How the Data Age Will Save American Education from Itself," is a member of United states TODAY'southward Board of Contributors.

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Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/10/28/should-trump-get-third-term-impeached-acquitted-column/2480302001/

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