Presidential Term Limits

     As I sat trying to think of a new topic to blog about I happened to overhear a conversation about Obama running for a 3rd term and a young man telling his friends that he (Obama) wanted to be the first president to do it. The list of problems with this statement was so long it took everything in me not to walk up to the young man no more than 20 years of age and slap him so hard he ended up back in his high school government class where he belonged. Luckily for me the young man's friend looked at him and informed him of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's election to a fourth and unfinished term. This second young man continued to tell his unbelieving friend that it was shortly after that in which congress passed a constitutional amendment which limited the number of terms a president could serve. The first young man responded that "he's gonna try it anyway." at this point I placed my headphones on my ears and ignored the rest of the conversation.

 

     This is precisely the reason I launched this blog there I was sitting in Ohio University Chillicothe, and still misunderstandings of this magnitude are all around us. For the record and according to heritage.org in response to F.D.R.'s unprecedented four elected terms the U.S. Congress passed the twenty-second amendment in 1947 which limits each President to two elected terms or in some case's such as my favorite President, Harry S Truman who served all but three months of FDR's fourth term as President due to the untimely death of his predecessor. Under the new requirements anyone serving more than two years of an unexpired term forfeits one elected term. Pres. Truman therefore having served three years and nine months of an unexpired term was technically disqualified from a second elected term. Special thanks to Great Grandma Truman's family records and trumanlittlewhitehouse.com for the information on Pres. Truman. also one last item according to whitehouse.gov and heritage.org Truman did have the option to run for a second elected term as the twenty-second amendment says that it  "shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by Congress." which basically means that the rule only applies to people elected after Truman. I used Truman as my example simply because of my personal connection with him.

Works Cited

http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/amendments/22/essays/184/presidential-term-limit

http://www.trumanlittlewhitehouse.com/key-west/president-truman-biography.htm