New Haven/Cambridge galaxy brain syndrome
By 
The Bezos’d op-ed section has come up with a new way of trying to legitimize Trump seeking a third term:
does violating the constitution in order to retain our mad king fall in the "personal liberty" vertical or the "free market" vertical?
[image or embed]— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 12:35 PM
To be Scrupulously Fair, Ayres is proposing a Grand Bargain rather than Trump just ignoring the 22nd Amendment:
Imagine, for instance, an amendment that allows Trump to run again in 2028 but at the same time abolishes the electoral college. Might that be an amendment the party could support?
The problem here is that he’s talking only about the Democratic Party. And I don’t think Democrats would agree to Trump pursuing a third term, but the bigger problem here is that Republicans (and remember that you need not just congressional majorities but 3/4 of state legislators) would never agree to abolish the Electoral College. Yes, it’s true that the current Republican coalition does not have a permanent EC edge — it essentially vanished in 2024 — but in a context in which two Republican presidents have won without a popular vote plurality in 25 years and Republicans have consequently convinced themselves of “it’s a republic, not a democracy” bullshit, that deal is DOA. The only effect of this thought experiment is to normalize the idea of Trump seeking a third term, which is presumably why the Murdoch crony in charge of the Post ran it.
Still, Ayres is at least clear that Trump is at the current time constitutionally ineligible for a third term. This is more than I can say for the fellow who was at one time arguably America’s most influential scholar of constitutional law:
the constitution isn’t is a word game and the fact that you can abuse the language to produce an outcome does not mean the constitution allows that outcome. the 22nd amendment was ratified to restrict a president to two terms in office, period. that is what it does.
[image or embed]— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) March 31, 2025 at 7:35 PM
i am frankly tires of this nihilistic textualism that ignores the plain purpose of constitutional language in favor of a “nothing in the rulebook” approach— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) March 31, 2025 at 7:38 PM
Even on its own terms, this textualism-for-dummies is massively unpersuasive — Trump is not in fact “eligible” to become president again. And the argument gets worse if you consider any of the other relevant factors to interpreting constitutional text (such as “what has everybody always understood this text to mean until Donald Trump started kidding on the square about seeking a third term.”) And the way you know these arguments are farcical is that for all intents and purposes nobody was making them in 2005 or 2013. Nobody of any prominence was inventing reasons why the 22nd Amendment didn’t mean what is says or accomplish the purpose it was designed to accomplish when Barack Obama was in the White House.
Which needless to say is why talking about a Grand Bargain is futile — if Trump wants to violate the Constitution and run again, he will, and he’ll have the support not only of the entire Republican Party but too many of the kind of liberal legal academic who assured us that Brett Kavanaugh was a transcendent legal supergenius.