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| - The bill would alter the Constitution to stipulate that a person can serve three terms as president so long as the person did not serve two consecutive terms prior to running for a third term.
Rumors that U.S. President Donald Trump would attempt to run for a third term, despite a Constitutional limit of two terms, predated the start of his second presidency on Jan. 20, 2025, and originated in part from past statements Trump himself had made.
On Jan. 23, however, reports emerged that a U.S. House Republican from Tennessee, Andy Ogles, had proposed a bill that would alter the U.S. Constitution in a way that would not only allow Trump to run for a third term, but that would also prevent former U.S. President Barack Obama, a Democrat, from doing the same:
This is a fair characterization of the bill Ogles introduced on Jan 23. 2025. The bill proposes a joint resolution from both houses of Congress to alter, through constitutional amendment, the two-term limit imposed on U.S. presidents — but only under certain circumstances.
The proposed change, as introduced in House Resolution 29, allows for a person to serve three terms as president so long as the person did not serve two consecutive terms prior to running for a third term:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, 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 twice.
This specific language, in practice, is relevant only to Trump, as it necessarily excludes all of the other former living presidents. Trump is only the second president in United States history to have served a second term non-consecutively.
Ogles was explicit in the bill's intention to provide Trump with the option of running for president a third time. In a news release, he stated:
I am proposing an amendment to the Constitution to revise the limitations imposed by the 22nd Amendment on presidential terms. This amendment would allow President Trump to serve three terms, ensuring that we can sustain the bold leadership our nation so desperately needs … It is imperative that we provide President Trump with every resource necessary to correct the disastrous course set by the Biden administration.
The bill, which had no co-sponsors at the time of this reporting, was introduced and immediately referred to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary. Even if the bill was successfully voted out of this committee, it is extremely unlikely that it would be successful in producing a Constitutional amendment. As described by the nonprofit Constitution Center, nearly all proposed amendments fail:
Since 1992, elected officials have introduced more than 1,400 proposed amendments in Congress for consideration, and not one has received the two-thirds vote required in both chambers to move forward to the states for ratification, where 38—or three-fourths of—states are needed to add the amendment to the Constitution.
The amendment process, laid out in Article V of the Constitution, requires not only the passage of a joint resolution like the one Ogles proposed, but also its ratification by the legislative bodies of three-fourths of the states.
Because a bill allowing Trump to run for a third term that also excludes all other living presidents was introduced by Ogles, we rate the claim as true.
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