Re: [OT] Trump's third term

On 2025-03-31 10:49 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

2025-03-30 11:30 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

2025-03-30 10:05 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

 

I see that Trump has mused about running for a third term. This CBC
article explains why that couldn't happen and suggests that this puts an
end to the discussion.

 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-third-term-president-constitutional-1.7497480

 

For some strange reason - ignorance, I expect - they complete ignore a
perfectly legal way to get Trump a third term: amend the 22nd amendment
to increase the number of terms or repeal that amendment altogether.

 

If I remember correctly, he'd need to get the approval of 3/4 of the
states and 2/3 of both chambers of Congress to agree and they'd only
have a set number of years to do it but if Trump really is as popular as
he thinks he is, that should be quite possible.

 

The set number of years was a characteristic of specific amendments
proposed in Congress but not others. It's not clear if that's
constitutional.

 

Fair enough. I was remembering the ERA which *almost* passed but fell
slightly short. As I recall, they gave it an extra few years but it
still fell short.

 

ERA may have passed as additional state legislatures voted in favor
after the expiration.

 

Good luck to Trump on his quest to become dictator.

 

Was FDR a dictator when he ran for his third and fourth terms?

 

There are historians who have argued that FDR was part of the pre-WWII
trend of countries that had been democracies turning toward autocracy.
Also, FDR never told the voters that he was way too sick to be president
when he ran for that fourth term.

 

Roosevelt running for a fourth term when he was at death's door was, of
course, morally wrong. So was Wilson failing to resign when he was
massively incapacitated for many months during WWI and simply let his
wife run things. Unfortunately, both acts were perfectly legal.

 I don't think so. In Wilson's case, it's known that there were times he
wasn't making decisions. His wife and personal physician were acting on
his behalf. That's illegal.

Did his wife and doctor consult Wilson about the various issues and merely pass on his decisions or was he completely uncommunicative so that they just took their best guesses about what he would have done had he been fit? I don't have a real problem with the former but the latter is obviously not cool. Simply passing on decisions he made has very little to distinguish itself from him passing a handwritten message to an underling.

If the public had known in either case, we'd
have gotten the 25th Amendment earlier than Eisenhower's heart attack.
This was clearly a scenario the Founding Fathers hadn't anticipated,
that a president could become incapacitated for an indefinite period of
time without dying and there should have been a provision for temporary
transfer of power.
 

It's hard to blame them though. You simply can't anticipate every possible situation years - or centuries - in advance. Now, if a similar situation had happened within living memory of the Founding Fathers, they might have chosen to write laws to handle it.
Oh wait, there *was* a precedent that would have been known to them! King George III was effectively incapacitated for many years with what was believed now to be either porphyria or bipolar disorder. There was a play and movie about it: The Madness of King George. The Wikipedia article about George III isn't clear on when he bouts of madness began but they finally became so severe that his son served in his stead as Prince Regent in 1810 and finally replaced him permanently in 1820. That was obviously too late for the first draft of the Constitution but *could* have served as inspiration for an Amendment to deal with comparable problems in America.

It's also bizarre that there was no provision to fill of office of Vice
President.
>

Agreed.

Maybe the laws - or even the Constitution - should be amended to force
every Presidential and VP candidate to pass a thorough medical (and
mental) exam before they can be put on a Presidential/VP ballot and also
pass an annual physical.

 The voters too? When these things are known, they may ignore the
problem.
 

. . .

Tests for voters have always been controversial and difficult. We can't seem to agree on much in the way of minimum qualifications beyond age and citizenship and even those are contested from some quarters. Other limits, like education, property ownership, or other things always seem to get struck down as unreasonable limitations.
Yet it's always tempting to add things to the current qualifications given the horrific choices voters seem prone to making. Case in point: if the polls are to be believed, the Liberals are poised to WIN the federal election in this country despite Mark Carney being even more fanatic about de-industrializing our country than Trudeau was. Just three months ago, just about everyone was certain that the next election would be a massive Conservative win with the Liberals reduced to under a dozen seats. Somehow, hundreds of thousands of my fellow Canadians have let themselves be deluded into thinking that Carney was somehow "better" than Poilievre.
I feel an urgent need to do SOMETHING to wake up my fellow Canadians or, failing that, to keep the idiots from voting but I can't think of a way to do either one. If ten years of Liberal misgovernment isn't enough to educate them, what can I possibly do?
--
Rhino