Volume 44, Issue 1 (Winter 2025)
By Sebastian Quiroga*
Debates over a three-term president have largely centered on the text and history of the Twenty-Second Amendment. Some argue that the Twenty- Second Amendment, in its plain language, merely precludes a twice-elected president from being “elected” to another term, but not from occupying the Office of the President altogether. Yet much of this modern conversation overlooks an earlier, and more foundational, constitutional moment—the Federal Convention of 1787. The final voted-on language of Article II’s Executive Eligibility Clause used the word “eligible” in its first half and “elected” in the second. Throughout the Convention, the Constitution’s Framers used “elected” and “eligible” interchangeably to describe the president. At the time of the Constitution’s ratification, it was understood that one could not be electable to the presidency without being eligible for it, and vice versa. This semantic history, largely unexamined in Twenty-Second Amendment scholarship, provides further support for the view that a two- term president is not only barred from election, but is ineligible altogether.
