Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution

About Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution in brief

The Twenty-second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution limits to two the number of times a person is eligible for election to the office of President of the United States. It also sets additional eligibility conditions for presidents who succeed to the unexpired terms of their predecessors. Until the amendment’s ratification, the president had not been subject to term limits, but George Washington had established a two-term tradition that many other presidents followed. The amendment was a reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election to an unprecedented four terms as president, but presidential term limits had long been debated in American politics. The framers of the Constitution originally approved four-year terms with no restriction on how many times a president could be elected president.. The Twenty- second Amendment was ratified by the requisite 36 of the then 48 states on February 27, 1951, and its provisions came into force on that date. It prohibits anyone who has been elected president twice from being elected again. Under the amendment, someone who fills an unexpired presidential term lasting more than two years is also prohibited from beingelected president more than once. It is unclear whether the amendment prohibits affected individuals from succeeding to the presidency under any circumstances or whether it applies only to presidential elections. It was approved by the Congress on March 21, 1947, and submitted it to the state legislatures for ratification on March 22, 1947. It has been ratified by all but one of the 48 states since then, with the exception of New Hampshire, which has not ratified the amendment since it was not required to do so to be a member of the Union.

The Amendment was adopted by Congress on February 21, 1951. It had been submitted to the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states within seven years from the date of its submission to the states by the congress. The first state to ratify the amendment was New Hampshire on February 22, 1951; the second state was Delaware on February 23, 1952; and the third state was Pennsylvania on February 24, 1952. The last state to approve the Amendment was New Jersey on February 25, 1953; the fourth state was Hawaii on February 26, 1953. The fourth state that ratified the amendment on February 28, 1953, was New Mexico; the fifth state was Alaska on February 29, 1953 and the sixth state was Wyoming on February 30, 1954; the last state was California on February 31, 1954, and the last one was Oregon on March 31, 1955. The 20th century has seen a number of amendments aimed at changing informal precedent to constitutional law, but none passed in the early to mid-19th century. The Constitution of the Confederate States of America, which seceded during the Civil War, limited the president to a single six-year term. In spite of the strong tradition, a few presidents attempted to secure a third term for a few years before the outset of the 1860s. At the start of the Civil war, the Confederate United States drafted the Constitution of America in most respects, which limited the presidency to one term, which was six years.