Is it possible for a president to serve a third term?

Is there a way President Trump (or any president) can serve a third (or fourth) term in office? Maybe there is. Most people assume the 22nd Amendment limits a president to two terms, period. What happens when the president, or legal scholars, challenge that assumption? Joining us to talk about that is Bruce Peabody of Fairleigh Dickinson University. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:15Speaker 04

  This is Civics 101. I'm Christina Phillips, filling in for Hannah McCarthy.

• 1:19Nick Capodice?

  And I'm Nick Capodice.

• 1:20Speaker 04

  Hi, Nick.

• 1:21Nick Capodice?

  Hi, Christina.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  So today, I want to tell you a story.

• 1:25Nick Capodice?

  All right.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  This story begins in the late 90s. We've got Clinton as the president. We've got Newt Gingrich is bopping around, okay?

• 1:36Nick Capodice?

  Oh, yeah, is this about the Republican takeover?

• 1:39Speaker 04

  Not really.

• 1:40Nick Capodice?

  Okay.

• 1:40Speaker 04

  It's not, but it's just what I think of when I think of the 90s.

• 1:45Nick Capodice?

  So what's this story about?

• 1:47Speaker 04

  So this is a story about two friends named Bruce and Scott, who love thinking about and talking about the Constitution.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  And one day, back in the 90s, they find themselves, like, two friends, debating the finale of severance, discussing the meaning of one constitutional amendment in particular. This is the amendment that sets term limits for the president, AKA the 22nd Amendment.

• 2:13Speaker 06

  It may not shock you to hear that I'm a little bit of a constitutional nerd, and I have friends who are constitutional nerds. So a friend and I were just talking, and I think, truth be told, he came up with the idea.

• 2:26Speaker 04

  This is Bruce Peabody. He is a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. So Bruce's friend in this story is Scott Gant. He's an attorney in Washington DC. Nick, will you do me the honor of reading the main clause of the 22nd Amendment?

• 2:42Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely, and I do not have this one memorized. Here we go. "No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice, and no person who has held the office of president or acted as president for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected president shall be elected to the office of the president more than once." I do have to say, Christina, this amendment, its meaning, seems pretty straightforward.

• 3:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't disagree with you there. A little context, it was passed in 1951 after President Franklin Roosevelt was re-elected three times during World War II, even though the norm since George Washington had been for presidents to only serve two terms. So it seemed like a good idea at the time to get that norm codified into law. And I think it's safe to say that you, me, and most of the public see this amendment and the norm it codifies as pretty cut and dry. Serve two terms as president, if you're lucky, and you're done. But Bruce and Scott's idea was to push on that collective understanding just a little bit.

• 3:51Speaker 06

  I mean, the basic argument is just that the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution... Passed after Franklin Roosevelt served an unprecedented four terms, seems to leave open some doors for a twice-elected president to serve once again.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  Now, this is something that's been pondered before. For example, Eisenhower once alluded to possibly returning to office as vice president. But since the amendment was passed, most people seem to have settled around the idea that two terms is all you get.

• 4:24Nick Capodice?

  So I don't remember the 90s too well politically because I was so young. But was there some reason that Bruce and Scott were talking about term limits in the 90s?

• 4:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was.

• 4:35Speaker 06

  I suppose the nominal prompt was the end of the Clinton administration. So his second term was coming to an end. He was quite young. He was seemingly ambitious. And he was relatively popular as a figure in the, well, certainly the late 20th century and definitely popular by the standards of the 21st.

• 4:56Speaker 04

  What if he stayed in politics and maybe got a job that put him in the line of succession? Does the 22nd Amendment hold up in that scenario? What if, for example, someone wants Clinton to be their vice president?

• 5:11Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, we've never had a scenario like that strange show, Designated Survivor. But even if Bill Clinton was like, you know, Secretary of Agriculture, he would be in that list. Like, he'd be in that order. It would be possible.

• 5:22Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm, exactly.

• 5:23Nick Capodice?

  And anyone out there who wants to know the order of succession, we have a whole episode on it. We got a link to it in the show notes.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  So in 1999, Bruce Peabody and Scott Gant published a legal article called "The Twice and Future President" in the Minnesota Law Review. That article laid out an argument for how a president could potentially serve more than two terms in office. And they supported this argument by looking at the origins of the 22nd Amendment, how the specific language of the amendment came to be, and how term limits had been talked about since its passage.

• 5:57Nick Capodice?

  So what was the reaction amongst the public when this article came out in the Law Review?

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Well, I will say, it's funny because this comes out in a legal journal. So the public reaction is not really, there really isn't a huge public reaction.

• 6:11Nick Capodice?

  They don't really read law reviews.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, but it does get the attention of a lot of people in the legal community, right? So some scholars responded directly to their article. Some refuted their claims, some built on those claims and offered other critiques using other parts of the Constitution. So it sort of lives in the scholarship around term limits and the 22nd Amendment constitutional interpretation. Now, in 2016, Bruce and Scott wrote a follow-up article, Twice and Future Presidents Revisited. They addressed some of those responses to their first article. They looked at presidents who had been in office since the article came out. And ultimately, they came to the same conclusions as they did in the first article, which is

• 6:55Speaker 04

  that there are pathways for somebody to serve more than two terms in office.

• 7:00Nick Capodice?

  And that revisitation of the article, I assume, happened before President Donald Trump was elected.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  It did. And now we've reached the final chapter of this story. Do you know what happens next?

• 7:13Nick Capodice?

  Well, I lack a skill of augury, Christine. I don't know what's going to happen next, but I do know that the current President Donald Trump has made overtures to thinking about running for a third term as president.

• 7:28Speaker 07

  People are asking me to run, and there's a whole story about running for a third term. I don't know, I never looked into it. And they do say there's a way you can do it, but I don't know about that.

• 7:39Speaker 08

  Should I run again? You tell me. There's your controversy right there. There's your controversy.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  President Trump has not yet, nor have any of his staff, provided their legal justification for how he could do this. He has just said that he could. And in fact, since he made those initial statements, this was after he was elected and in the early months of 2025. He has walked them back and he has said that he planned to be a two-term president.

• 8:16Speaker 09

  But it's something that, to the best of my knowledge, you're not allowed to do. I don't know if that's constitutional, that they're not allowing you to do it or anything else, but there are many people selling the 2028 hat. But this is not something I'm looking to do. I'm looking to have four great.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Nonetheless, this caused a little bit of chaos in the news cycle when he first started saying this, right? I think we can't count out the fact that his election was a very emotional one for a lot of people. We live in a very partisan environment in which the temperature is very high. And so when he starts speaking about doing something that most people have understood a president cannot and should not do, it generates a lot of attention, right? Journalists like us try to figure out what reasons he's alluding to. They try to answer the question, could he do this? Or if he tried, what would happen?

• 9:11Speaker 04

  And the way that journalists often do this is that we consult constitutional scholars and political scientists. And I kept seeing Bruce's name in this article from 1999 being cited over and over and over, everywhere, by all kinds of publications, from NPR to the Daily Mail, to Axios, to the Wall Street Journal, to the National Constitution Center. They even do a write-up of his argument and put it in position with other arguments about the 22nd Amendment.

• 9:45Nick Capodice?

  Has Bruce talked to President Trump? Like, do we know that their paper is what Trump is talking about?

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Have you been, uh, has anyone in the Trump administration reached out to you? Or have you had any communication with them?

• 9:57Speaker 06

  No communication with Trump administration.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, so. I was curious about Bruce's argument, for sure, and what he thought about how Trump was talking about term limits. But also, I was really curious about what it's like when essentially you have your research go viral. And not only that, it's research you did many years ago, and it's on a legal theory that has not yet been tested, right?

• 10:28Speaker 06

  So what happens in part is you start getting inquiries, right, which is gratifying, I suppose, but also, more generally, it does maybe shift that earlier conversation from it being more of a scholarly exercise to thinking about both the general public conversation and then thinking through some of the policy implications. But the basic argument shouldn't change, right? So people are generally answering these questions with specific scenarios and people in mind that shouldn't change the analysis, right? If the legal arguments are sound in 1999, they should remain sound in 2025, regardless of the person seeking the office.

• 11:13Nick Capodice?

  I just think it's so interesting in the work that we do, Christina. We keep running into these old legal articles that were sort of like, you know, philosophical what ifs that are now playing out in the public marketplace of ideas every day.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  I agree with you, and I think what was nice about talking to him is that he is having the experience himself, where he has spent a lot of time thinking about this theoretically, and then somebody is coming to him and saying, this person is saying they're going to do this, is what you're saying how they would do it. And he's having to work through that himself.

• 11:45Speaker 06

  These issues have a number of different strands, right? There's what's the best reading of this provision of the Constitution and the Constitution as a whole, and then there's the political question of, you know, what are the implications for this? And those are intertwined, but also separable, right? You could have a legal conclusion about the 22nd Amendment, but also fervently believe it should be reformed, or you could think this is the right interpretation, but still fret about future scenarios where the country is, the country doesn't agree or is uncertain, and something that's supposedly a strength, the kind of continuity of executive leadership is compromised.

• 12:24Speaker 04

  So I think the point of this episode is not to tell you whether the president can serve more than two terms or not, though hopefully you'll leave with more information to decide how you feel about it. The truth is, no president has seriously tried this since the amendment was ratified in 1951, and that includes President Trump. If he does try to pursue options to stay in office or serve a third term, we don't know what that would look like yet. And we don't know what the public, or Congress, or the courts would do.

• 12:53Nick Capodice?

  All right, well regardless of how it makes us all feel, let's get into the words.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  We will do that right after our break.

• 13:00Nick Capodice?

  All right. But before that break, just a reminder, you can listen to any of our hundreds of episodes on myriad topics and see a whole bunch of other stuff that we've got for teachers and the public alike at our website, civics101podcast.org.

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• 14:31Speaker 00

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Make them remember you.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

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• 15:17Nick Capodice?

  We're back. You're listening to Civics 101. We're talking about the 22nd Amendment. And Christina, let's get into what it says.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  Yes, let's start with the basics. Nick, you quoted it a little bit earlier, but would you just read the first clause for me again?

• 15:31Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely. Quote, "No person shall be elected to the office of president more than twice."

• 15:38Speaker 04

  It's that word "elected." No person shall be elected to the office.

• 15:43Nick Capodice?

  Ah.

• 15:45Speaker 06

  So, most people assume that the 22nd Amendment bars a president from serving again, and that's not exactly what it says, right? It just says, "No person shall be elected to the office of president more than twice." And then it has some other language, which basically says that if somebody else serves for more than two years of a term, somebody else begin, you know, think maybe like a vice president taking over for president, that counts as one elected term for the purposes of the 22nd Amendment. So, on some level, you might say, "Well, what's the big difference, right? Isn't that the same thing?" But for the reasons we spelled out, it's really not the same thing.

• 16:24Speaker 06

  And it's an interesting choice that the words are focusing on election, which is obviously an important, I think we can probably stipulate, the most important way to become president, but not the only way. So, a deeper dive into the surrounding language, a deeper dive into the kind of history surrounding the debates around the 22nd Amendment, and a closer look at our history suggested to us that the best reading was that this choice really did leave open the door to other options.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  The article spends some time discussing how people settled on the exact wording of the amendment that is important to this argument. At one point, there was this idea that the amendment should say something like, "No person shall serve," rather than "be elected," which, of course, would probably be more clear. And the article goes into the history of why they ultimately went with the word "elected."

• 17:21Nick Capodice?

  Right. So I'm guessing that one scenario would be, a person is a president for two terms, and then they get nominated as someone else's vice president. Can that happen?

• 17:33Speaker 04

  That's a good question. Bruce and Scott's article argue that it could, potentially.

• 17:38Nick Capodice?

  And if they are vice president, there is the possibility the current president dies and that vice president could be president again.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's one idea they talk about. There are a few other scenarios they explored. I'll go through a couple of them. One is if a former two-term president ascends to the presidency through some other means, like being the Speaker of the House, or another person in the line of succession, like you had said, the designated survivor in some scenario like that. The second option could be a contingent election, where nobody wins 270 electoral votes. In that case, the House would choose the president and the Senate would choose the vice president. In that scenario, could the chosen president be somebody who's already been president for two terms? This is something that Bruce and Scott talk about in their article, as potentially being possible.

• 18:28Nick Capodice?

  Because they weren't elected.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. They just, you know, maybe the House was just like, "Let's just, you know, bring back the other guy. He seems good." So ultimately, their conclusion is that the 22nd Amendment's language leaves the possibility open for someone to come back into office after two full terms.

• 18:53Nick Capodice?

  But it seems like there is a general consensus on one thing, which is that the 22nd Amendment bars a person from being reelected for a third time. Also, I think it's worth pointing out that in all of these scenarios you laid out, an actual presidential election still happens in the first place.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's safe to say that this is operating under the assumption that someone isn't going to violate the Constitution by canceling the election.

• 19:21Nick Capodice?

  A quick question I wanted to ask earlier, Christina. Can somebody be elected vice president if they've already been a president two times? Like, isn't this something laid out in the 12th Amendment or something like that?

• 19:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're thinking of the ineligibility clause of the 12th Amendment, which says, quote, "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice president of the United States." And that is an example of a counterargument made by other scholars in response to Bruce and Scott's paper.

• 19:55Nick Capodice?

  Ah, OK.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  The 12th Amendment says that someone must be qualified to be president in order to be vice president. So the reasoning goes, you can't become vice president if you've already been elected for two terms, because that would disqualify you. And one of the people who made this argument is Akil Amar, who is a constitutional scholar that we've had on the show a bunch of times before.

• 20:20Nick Capodice?

  Akil Amar is wonderful, by the way. Everyone out there, you should listen to his amazing podcast, Amarica's Constitution. It's like Civics 275, instead of 101, 494. He's great.

• 20:37Nick Capodice?

  Real quick, back to the 12th Amendment. This is the amendment that ended the practice, which I find kind of hilarious, where the person who lost the election became the vice president, which is, if you can imagine that happening in 2025, meaning that from then on, candidates pick their own running mates.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, imagine the bipartisanship that would have to happen.

• 20:58Nick Capodice?

  Or the lack of, the lack of bipartisanship.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  And by the way, Bruce thinks that these counterarguments, including Akil's, are a big reason why this article that he wrote is valuable in the first place.

• 21:16Speaker 06

  A lot of people disagree with our analysis, but that's OK, right? It's kind of fun and helpful to have smart critics, and we're still convinced we're right.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  And I have to admit, Nick, I asked Bruce, what I always worry, sounds like a rude question, but genuinely comes from a place of curiosity, which is... Why do this? Why analyze the Constitution, spend hours doing research and studying case law and coming through transcripts from Congress, all for something that gets published in a legal journal? It's not being used, at least not yet, to defend somebody in court or to make an argument in court. It's not necessarily going to be used to write policy. So what's the point?

• 22:00Speaker 06

  I have an interest, just to speak for myself, I have an interest in talking to a community of peers. They're interesting people, are curious about ideas. We try to test our arguments against one another. There's various forms of peer review, so that's intellectually stimulating and kind of what my profession does. Second, there is this interest in talking to a wider public, right? The Constitution's our supreme law. We should be educated about it. Its longevity and good health requires a literate and critical citizenry, so many of these kinds of issues are great moments of constitutional literacy and kind of reflection.

• 22:39Nick Capodice?

  And when Bruce says "these kinds of issues," does he mean when our president starts talking about his interpretation of term limits and that the public gets more interested too?

• 22:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 22:53Speaker 06

  At least one-third possibility is almost a kind of constitutional policy perspective. Is this really what we have as the best reading of the law? Is this something we're comfortable as a nation having as a set of options? Or alternatively, is there something kind of screwy about this that we need to fix through whatever means that might be?

• 23:15Nick Capodice?

  You mentioned earlier that Bruce and Scott, his co-author, they wrote an update to the paper in 2016?

• 23:21Speaker 04

  They did.

• 23:22Speaker 06

  I didn't fundamentally change our point of view, our basic conclusions, but certainly the piece updated things historically, right? It brought in this, well, this 21st century set of candidates, including Clinton and Obama and kind of where they stood. And it discussed some of these episodes where their names have been floated as potential running mates, or did the 22nd Amendment apply to them? And then another part of the analysis was just to consider, and I hope refute, or at least engage, some of these critiques and questions. Scholars over the years have taken this argument seriously, great, but offered different

• 24:01Speaker 06

  arguments as to why, in their judgment, some are all of the scenarios we laid out whereby a twice-elected president could again serve. I did not, I did not change the position, but I guess it's a long-winded way of saying I tried to take my critics seriously.

• 24:20Nick Capodice?

  So I do want to talk about the politics around this. Just because the law might suggest you could do something, that doesn't necessarily mean you should do it, or that the people want you to do it. Historically, at least, we like, as a nation, we like having term limits. We don't want kings.

• 24:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, and for scholars, this can feel a little tricky, especially when people are asking you to explain to them how a law could permit something that maybe they don't like. This made me think about a story on NPR that Hanzi Lo Wong wrote about President Trump's comments. The article quotes Bruce and quotes another scholar, a guy named Stephen Gillers, who is a law professor at NYU, who talks about a potentially feasible hypothetical scenario where Trump could make a deal with Vice President Vance. So if Vance ran for president, Trump could run on the VP ticket and then become president. Okay?

• 25:25Speaker 04

  So he explains this in this article, and then he says, quote, "I want to make it very clear that I'm identifying an argument that Trump could make in order to get back into the White House. I'm not endorsing it."

• 25:44Nick Capodice?

  And like we see over and over again, like we talked about in our framing episode, all it takes is somebody saying, you know, one potential argument for it to be turned into a defense of that behavior.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  Right. Whether you like it or not, and everybody does this, right?

• 26:00Nick Capodice?

  And then, you know, headlines could be, "Top Legal Scholar Says, Well, This Is Good. This is, you know, this legal scholar said it's a way to do it, and therefore it's gold, and it's gold forever on."

• 26:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So I asked Bruce about this, about how he approaches this.

• 26:14Speaker 06

  People will often ask me for kind of policy prescriptions, or, you know, do I really believe this in the age of Trump? Aren't I a kind of apologist for centralizing power? And I think I generally try to separate my roles as a partisan or a voter from my roles as a constitutional interpreter. But I want people to take the argument seriously. This is an old idea, right? The Fedders Papers famously signed their documents publius rather than leaning into, you know, Hamilton, Madison, or Jay, because in part, they don't want people to dismiss their arguments for their specific political or partisan goals.

• 26:59Nick Capodice?

  When that first article came out, did Bruce share it with politicians or interest groups or any of that stuff? Like, did he contact Bill Clinton's people and say, "Hey, you should check this out"?

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, he did.

• 27:10Nick Capodice?

  Oh.

• 27:11Speaker 06

  We did send the piece to William Jefferson Clinton, and he gave back a very nice response. So that was gratifying and fun. And Mr. Bush, the second President Bush, was another twice-elected president after the time of our article. He didn't have the same popularity as, I think, Clinton or maybe Obama. So the issue didn't come up quite in the same way with him. But there was some chatter with Mr. Obama. He went to Ethiopia and gave some remarks before the African Union and said, "I'm pretty popular. If I'd been able to run for a third term, I could have won."

• 27:50Speaker 11

  But under our Constitution, I cannot run again.

• 27:55Speaker 11

  I can't run again.

• 28:00Speaker 11

  I actually think I'm a pretty good president. I think if I ran, I could win. But I can't.

• 28:07Speaker 06

  At one point, Secretary and Senator Clinton, Hillary Clinton, said that she had thought about making Bill her vice president. So that was interesting. And then said that on closer reflection, she had decided he was not able to to serve in that capacity.

• 28:25Speaker 12

  He has served his two terms. And I think the argument would be, as vice president, it would not be possible for him to ever succeed to the position. At least, that's what I've been told. So you know, it has crossed my mind.

• 28:39Nick Capodice?

  Considering all this, did Bruce share with you his thoughts on what Trump has said about serving a third term?

• 28:47Speaker 04

  So in one of the articles Bruce had been interviewed for, he says, quote, "We've already seen," to put it lightly, "unusual legal arguments from the Trump administration," end quote. And I wanted to know what he meant by that, because I think so much coverage of the Trump administration lately has felt like it's about how he does things differently, or how his presidency feels different on a policy and a public experience level. But for someone who thinks about constitutional interpretation, what counts as unusual? And why does that matter?

• 29:20Speaker 06

  I think it's fair to say, instinctively say, well, this is a little loopy. Everybody knows that the Constitution bars a president from service more than two terms. So to advance an argument, especially an argument about whether a person could serve in a third term, you have to win legal arguments, but presumably, you also have to win the political arguments. So I think the point, and using the word unusual there, is to say, this might be a president and might be an administration that doesn't care, right? That they're willing to say, hey, there's a conventional wisdom on what it means under the 14th Amendment to be a citizen, and we're going to challenge that, right? There's conventional wisdom about when one might issue executive orders and the role of Congress, and we're not going to be bound by that.

• 30:03Speaker 06

  So if you've got that backdrop of a kind of iconoclast, or somebody's willing to be a norm breaker on these other areas, then we should take seriously the prospect that the 22nd Amendment might be pursued in the same way.

• 30:21Speaker 06

  Another ingredient I would add to that is, again, not only a partisan environment, but a particular kind of partisan environment where people tend to see their opponents as dangerous, right? As not just policy disagreeers, or people promoting different candidates, but as purported threats to the health of the republic. So, yeah, I think that is a different model than certainly we've lived with for much of our history, and certainly a different model than some of the framers envisioned, but it's where we are now.

• 31:05Nick Capodice?

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• 31:47Nick Capodice?

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• 32:26Speaker 10

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• 32:56Nick Capodice?

  We're back here listening to Civics 101. We're talking about the 22nd Amendment. So Christina, all of this makes me think about something we haven't talked about yet, which is amending the Constitution. We can do it, you know? It's a living document, whether it comes from President Trump proposing an amendment that eliminates two-term limits, or, you know, potentially revisiting the language of the 22nd Amendment. Hey, this isn't clear enough. Now, I do know it's really hard. Like, the idea of even proposing a constitutional amendment seems pretty tough right now, considering you need 2/3 of both chambers of Congress to even propose it in the first place, never

• 33:36Nick Capodice?

  mind the staggering consensus you need for ratification, which is 3/4 of all the states.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  Right. And for what it's worth, House Democrat Dan Goldman of New York introduced a resolution after Trump made these initial statements, saying that the term limits do apply to Trump. And House Republican Andrew Ogles from Tennessee introduced an amendment proposal that would extend term limits. Both were just introduced, they're, you know, just kind of sitting there right now, but there is interest in both directions for this.

• 34:08Speaker 06

  What do you do about the problem of constitutional change? George Washington was very clear that our Constitution was imperfect, as he put it, that our Constitution would need regular updates. Jefferson famously said, "Every generation or every 19 years, we need to reboot the whole thing and start over." So, there's a tension between... A constitution that clearly anticipates itself as needing to change, is imperfect, that has to be adapted for the generations to come. And the reality that in the 21st century, at least so far, it's extremely unlikely that we'll get a formal constitutional amendment. It's very hard. It's very hard as a general matter to change our constitution.

• 34:51Speaker 06

  And that's independent of our current environment, where we have closely divided parties and perspectives. And those groups are very unlikely to cooperate. How are we going to get the two-thirds votes to propose an amendment and the three-quarters votes to ratify them when we can't get even ordinary legislation passed?

• 35:21Speaker 04

  So there's something I want to leave us with, Nick, that I hope you and me and our listeners can use. When our understanding of how our democracy works is challenged, whether by a president, by a person in our life, or by something happening in the news. I asked Bruce how to approach these moments when you go, "I thought I understood what this said, and now I'm not so sure," given that he's a professor and he teaches people about our government all the time.

• 35:47Speaker 06

  One answer is read the text, go back to the basics. The framers believed the Constitution and the law it creates was different from the law created in statutes or the law found in the cases issued by different judges of justice. They thought it was basically accessible by ordinary citizens. So start with the original text. That's a good place to begin. I guess another aspect of this is, of course, to push your partisan priors. So if one has a strong reaction to this or any other argument about constitutional meaning, try it out on your, for sure, most preferred candidate or political figure or party. But then also say, could you live with this reading

• 36:32Speaker 06

  if your political opponent or the person you think is most dangerous were to take advantage of it? And that's not a foolproof test, but it is a good one. For example, in a field like impeachment. So what is the meaning of impeachment? What counts as a high crime or misdemeanor? I think that's a really good exercise for a question like that to say. Yeah, if I'm going to dismiss a particular impeachment charge, would I really feel the same way if it were my partisan opponents?

• 37:01Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, this is an exercise that you hear played out every single day in Washington, right? Well, if we get away with it, they're going to get away with it next time. And you hear this from both sides. And it leads me to reiterate the one true thing that I've learned since working on the show is that hypocrisy doesn't matter. Just because one side does one thing in a scenario and then does the opposite in another, the argument, hey, you did the opposite last time, or you said the opposite back when we were in charge, that doesn't hold any water and it never gets anyone anywhere.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  But do you still think it's useful if you are like, how do I feel about impeachment? Like, do I think that this person should be impeached that I hate? And then you say, well, what if it was my, the person that I loved who was in office? Do you feel like that's helpful for the public?

• 37:51Nick Capodice?

  Well, it's helpful for you and me. It's helpful for the public, but nobody in Congress does it. It's true.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:57Nick Capodice?

  But you know, you see this all the time. People say, I swear I will not do this if, when I'm in charge. And then they do it when they're in charge. This happens over and over again from both sides. So I do think it's helpful for you and I to think that way. Because that's a human way, right? To, it's the golden rule, right? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I always think about when we talk about policy, every time that you change it when you are in charge, that sticks around, right? So this is, I think, something that's been happening over many decades is that the party in charge will, in Congress, give the president more power. And then the president, the next president continues to have that much power. And then maybe they get a little bit more, and then maybe they get a little bit more, and maybe they get a little bit more. I think it's helpful for us to think about as people, but I wish I saw a little bit more of that, or at least news coverage about it. Maybe it's happening, but I don't read about it very much, about thinking about the implications beyond this current administration, because there will be a future.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Like, we do have to live with what we do now in the future, and how will that play out? And who's going to be happy about it?

• 39:10Nick Capodice?

  This is so good. It's depressing, but it's a good, it's good.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  This episode was produced by me, Christina Phillips, with help from Nick Capodice. It was edited by Rebecca Lavoy. Our team includes host Hannah McCarthy and producer Marina Henke. Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound and Chris Sabriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 39:47Nick Capodice?

  I'm always dehydrated. I hate water.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  Do you need water?

• 39:51Nick Capodice?

  I'm sounding like Marlon Brando doing his Don. Did you see the Godfather movies?

• 39:57Speaker 04

  No.

• 39:57Nick Capodice?

  Oh.

• 39:58Speaker 04

  I've never seen them.

• 39:58Nick Capodice?

  I knew it. The second I made that list, I was like, wait a minute.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't, I'm not.

• 40:03Nick Capodice?

  What if I told you they're really phenomenal?

• 40:06Speaker 04

  I believe you. I just, um...

• 40:08Nick Capodice?

  Just the first one?

• 40:09Speaker 04

  Here's the problem.

• 40:10Nick Capodice?

  I know their boyfriend film. Like, I know every, like, oh, my god, Eric girlfriend.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're such a boyfriend film that they're a Barbie reference.

• 40:16Nick Capodice?

  Really? Oh, yeah.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  So you haven't seen Barbie. Well.

• 40:20Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 04

  I consider Barbie the godfather of the 21st century.

• 40:50Speaker 13

  Did you know that if your spouse goes missing and you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime? That surprising fact is at the heart of the brand-new season of Bear Brook, the critically acclaimed true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. I'm your host, Jason Moon. In this season, Bear Brook investigates another New Hampshire mystery. A Christmas tree farmer with dementia vanishes. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found? Don't miss it. Follow Bear Brook wherever you get your podcasts.

• 41:20Speaker 00

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  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

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