#71-72: The president's term in office

These two essays consider whether four years is exactly the right term of office for the president. Hamilton reasonably asserts that the presidential term should be long enough to get things done, but not so long that the president loses touch with the people. Hamilton reiterates the case for a powerful executive: if the national executive has any job to do, then he needs to be strong enough to do it well. He says, “[T]he Executive should be in a situation to dare to act his own opinion with vigor and decision.”

The main consideration for Hamilton, from his vantage point at the very beginning of the nation’s history, when no one was sure how things were going to turn out, was whether the president would be able to work with a Congress that was elected in a different cycle than his. Hamilton muses that each Congress, elected on a two-year cycle, might sweep into office with a fresh mandate and reverse the policy goals of the president before he can accomplish them. Hamilton appears to worry so much about Congress ruling over the president that he uses the words “prospect of annihilation” to describe it:

It cannot be affirmed, that a duration of four years, or any other limited duration, would completely answer the end proposed; but it would contribute towards it in a degree which would have a material influence upon the spirit and character of the government. Between the commencement and termination of such a period, there would always be a considerable interval, in which the prospect of annihilation would be sufficiently remote, not to have an improper effect upon the conduct of a man indued with a tolerable portion of fortitude; and in which he might reasonably promise himself, that there would be time enough before it arrived, to make the community sensible of the propriety of the measures he might incline to pursue.

Presumably, Hamilton alludes here to annihilating the president’s policy ambitions – not actually murdering him. This is a good place to recall that today’s notion of “three co-equal branches of government” was never the founders’ intention. Hamilton and the others expected Congress to be the most powerful of the three.

Hamilton admits he’s not sure, and has no way of being sure, that four years is the right number of years. He is confident, though, that the president should be allowed to run for re-election without limitation. He despises the “pernicious” notion of term limits:

Nothing appears more plausible at first sight, nor more ill-founded upon close inspection, than a scheme which in relation to the present point has had some respectable advocates, I mean that of continuing the chief magistrate in office for a certain time, and then excluding him from it, either for a limited period or forever after. This exclusion, whether temporary or perpetual, would have nearly the same effects, and these effects would be for the most part rather pernicious than salutary.

 Hamilton imagines that without the possibility of getting re-elected, presidents will turn corrupt and grasp “emoluments” while they can. This is a shocking admission. Elsewhere, Hamilton promised that only virtuous men could get into the office. But now he admits that future presidents are likely to be avaricious. He uses that word five time in one paragraph. And later he describes them as “men of irregular ambition” with an “appetite for gain.”

Hamilton next says limiting the president to a fixed number of years is a bad idea because people get better at their work from experience, and it would be foolish to push a man out of the office after he has learned to do the job well. He suggests that history demands particular men in particular times of crisis:

There is no nation which has not, at one period or another, experienced an absolute necessity of the services of particular men in particular situations; perhaps it would not be too strong to say, to the preservation of its political existence. . . . Without supposing the personal essentiality of the man, it is evident that a change of the chief magistrate, at the breaking out of a war, or at any similar crisis, for another, even of equal merit, would at all times be detrimental to the community.

That notion of there being one — and only one — right person for the moment is appealing. And history provides some examples. Israel needed Moses. England needed Churchill. France needed Henri IV and perhaps Charles de Gaulle. The arrival of Abraham Lincoln during the crisis of the 1860s was one of America’s greatest bits of good fortune.

Literature, too, is rich with stories of the solitary hero. The thumbnail for this essay represents a genuine case: the Roman hero Horatius Cocles saving Rome by standing in a narrow bridge and fighting off an invading enemy.

One might also argue that Franklin D. Roosevelt was the right man to guide the country through the Great Depression and World War II. Roosevelt is the only president in American history to serve more than two terms, and his third term came as World War II was beginning. Roosevelt certainly served the country well during his three-plus terms. And yet after he died in office, the country immediately agreed four terms is too many. Limitation on presidential eligibility was imposed by the 22nd Amendment which was voted through Congress in 1947 and approved by the states in 1951.

Discuss

• Should presidents be allowed to serve more than two terms or 10 years?

• How realistic is the idea that one person – and only one – is capable of doing a job?