Presidential Term Limits in American History: Power, Principles, and Politics

Chapter 2 Executive Tenure in Early American History

cHaPter 2 executive tenure in early american History If we judge from the experience of all other countries, and even our own, we may conclude that, as the President of the United States may be reelected, so he will. George Mason, Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788 debates over executive tenure in general revolve around concerns over power and democracy and the perceived relationship of tenure to these values. Prior to the debate at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, it was standard to assume that long tenure in an executive office without “rotation” or term limits was inconsistent with democratic ideals. This Whig view of the executive emerged from the English struggle between Parliament and the monarchy during the seventeenth century and is perhaps best articulated in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.1 Although I will cover later in the chapter some nuances of Locke’s theory of executive power, his legacy to American political thinkers and politicians is primarily his wariness of executive authority. For our purposes here, this Whig view embraces limited tenure in office for executives. Jefferson perfectly embodied this traditional, or Whig, view. In a wellknown letter to James Madison, Jefferson commented on the lack of presidential term limits in the proposed constitution. He observed that “[e]xperience concurs with reason in concluding that the first magistrate will always be re-elected if the constitution permits it.”2 Jefferson saw it as a question of a long-serving president consolidating power and wielding it in corrupt ways, against the interests of democracy and the people. From the Whig perspective, long executive tenure was practically synonymous with monarchy, which was, of course, synonymous with tyranny and 14 | chapter 2 abuse of power. The Whig perspective also viewed leadership in a more collective sense and thereby encouraged multiple centers of leadership, and especially sought to avoid the temptation of “indispensable” leadership . Short terms and term limits, including the idea of rotation—which will be discussed more fully later—sought to address these concerns. What the delegates to the Convention discovered was that there would be no neat dichotomy: that short terms and limits did not necessarily mean a democratic and less powerful (or even viable) executive, nor did a long-serving, reeligible executive naturally connote an anti-democratic tyrant. Alexander Hamilton best encapsulated the new view in The Federalist . He saw the possibility of a long-serving president nobly wielding power in times of crisis, arguing against “banishing men from stations in which, in certain emergencies of the state, their presence might be of great moment to the public interest or safety.”3 And he and other delegates also saw democratic claims as the justification for unlimited reelection of a president. In this view, the people could be trusted to elect good leaders (even if for numerous terms) who would keep the people’s interests, not their own, in mind—sometimes even by acting against the immediate desires of the public.4 Guided by this conceptual focus on power and democracy, this chapter examines the tenure debate from the colonial through the constitutional periods. It addresses colonial as well as state gubernatorial tenure restrictions and pays particular attention to the debates surrounding presidential tenure at the Constitutional Convention. The chapter concludes with a two-dimensional theoretical table to help focus the connections between power, democracy, and executive tenure historically and contemporarily. Historical roots: the colonial governors While an evolutionary study of theoretical views of executive tenure in early American history is relatively uncharted ground, there is an extensive literature on the political ideas of the Revolutionary and Founding generations.5 Moreover, a number of works are devoted, at least in part, to examining American views of executive power, including their views on executive tenure.6 Although what follows is heavy on interpretation of primary documents, this extensive scholarship on the Revolutionary and constitutional periods and the American presidency guides and shapes the analysis. executive tenure in early american History | 15 When creating the office of the presidency under the Constitution, the founders looked to the state governors for guidelines on powers, length of term, reeligibility, and so forth. But, state gubernatorial offices were not invented out of whole cloth in the wake of independence; however much they departed from the colonial tradition, the offices were nevertheless rooted in the mores and structures of colonial governorships. And there was substantial variety among these colonial governorships, some of...