What Does the 22nd Amendment Say About Term Limits?

The 22nd Amendment limits an American president to two terms in office. The amendment, ratified in 1951, says that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice” and sets a maximum term of 10 total years in office for a president who started as vice president during another person’s term.  

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 fiercely debated how long a president should serve in office. Proposals included terms as short as three years and as long as 20 years, according to Thomas Neale of the Congressional Research Service. Federalists wanted longer terms to ensure continuity in the chief executive, while Anti-Federalists feared that reelection could lead to a dictatorship.  

The first compromise was a single seven-year term without eligibility for reelection, but that fell apart when delegates couldn’t agree how the president would be elected—by Congress, by the states or by the people?  

Left undecided, the question of presidential elections and term limits was referred to the Committee on Postponed Matters, which hammered out a novel solution. The president would be elected by “electors” chosen by each state (known, collectively, as the Electoral College) and would serve a four-year term. However, there were no limits placed on how many times a president could be reelected.  

When George Washington stepped down after his second term, he established a powerful precedent limiting presidents to two terms. But politicians from all parties worried that their opponents might break with tradition and stay in office indefinitely.  

Before the 22nd Amendment, there were nearly 200 attempts by Congress to impose term limits on the president (the first as early as 1788). The closest Congress came to passing an amendment was during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant when Grant’s Republican allies floated the idea of a third term.  

Instead of an amendment, the House passed a resolution warning that “any departure from [George Washington's] time-honored custom would be unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught with peril to our free institutions.”   

The 22nd Amendment was definitely written in response to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the first president elected to more than two terms, but it was passed after FDR had died in 1945. Starting in 1932, Roosevelt was elected four consecutive times and served from the Great Depression through World War II. FDR died from a cerebral hemmorrhage not long after his fourth inauguration.  

Previous attempts to impose term limits had failed because constitutional amendments require a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. The 22nd Amendment passed because Roosevelt’s Republican opponents teamed with southern Democrats upset over Roosevelt’s liberal policies.  

Congress approved the 22nd Amendment in 1947, and the states ratified it in 1951.  

The first call in Congress to repeal the 22nd Amendment came in 1956, and dozens more have followed from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, according to Neale. Starting in the 1970s, several members of Congress proposed changing the presidency to a single six-year term without the option of reelection, but those bills never came to a vote. Similarly, no effort to repeal the 22nd Amendment has advanced beyond a congressional subcommittee. 

That’s an open question. The wording of the 22nd Amendment bars an individual from being “elected” president more than twice, but does not state that they are ineligible for office after two terms.  

Technically, it’s possible for a former two-term president to be elected vice president and then return to power if the president dies or is removed from office. That situation has never been tested.