Third Term
“I’m not joking,” said President Donald Trump to NBC this past weekend, referring to his talk of seeking a third term.
“A lot of people want me to do it,” said Trump on the air. “But I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”
“I’m focused on the current,” he added. When pressed on how exactly he could seek a third term—something barred by the 22nd Amendment—he claimed “there are methods which you could do it.”
Some sycophants, such as Rep. Andy Ogles (R–Tenn.), have in the past introduced legislation to amend the Constitution to allow for a third Trump term. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon told NewsNation earlier this month that “I’m a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028.” Bannon called himself a “huge believer in democracy” in the very same interview, claiming the country is experiencing a “1932-type realignment.”
He’s of course referring to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served four terms. (The 22nd Amendment, limiting the number of terms for which a president can serve, was passed after FDR’s death.) No modern presidents have broken with precedent or attempted to skirt the Constitution in this manner. It would be wrong and bad for Trump to attempt this, and even his attempts to anchor—framing the whole negotiation, beginning to normalize such an idea early, going for the plausible-deniability approach and not endorsing the idea outright, resting it on how other people want him to do it—should be forcefully opposed.
The government can’t tell what a gang tattoo looks like: On Friday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether the wave of deportations they’ve been conducting is legal. The administration claims that the case presents “fundamental questions about who decides how to conduct sensitive national-security-related operations in this country” and that we cannot wait for it to wend its way through lower courts.
This case will give us a sense of how the Supreme Court intends to handle the due process–free deportations Trump has been attempting under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which was used to put Japanese-Americans in camps during World War II and is now being used to mass-deport Venezuelans. With the gang Tren de Aragua declared a “foreign terrorist organization,” the Trump administration has made the case that during times of war or invasion, citizens of a “hostile nation” ages 14 and above may be removed from the country with few legal protections.
Article from Reason.com
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