Why 22 amendment

But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term. Section 2.

This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress. The Twenty-second Amendment was proposed on March 24, , and ratified on February 27, The amendment imposed term limits on the office of president of the United States.

Indeed, throughout U. Ulysses S. Theodore Roosevelt sought a third term in but lost it would have been his second elected term. Continue reading from Britannica. On November 5, , President Franklin D. Roosevelt won a third term in office—an unprecedented act that would be barred by a constitutional amendment a decade later. The third-term decision dominated his election campaign against the Republican contender, Wendell Wilkie. Grant also sought a third term in , but he lacked enough party support to get a nomination.

The first president, Washington, set the two-term precedent in when he decided to pass on a third term, setting up a scramble between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in the fall race. In , a friend urged Washington to come out of retirement to run for a third term.

Washington made his thoughts quite clear, especially when it came to new phenomena of political parties. Instead, he backed William Howard Taft as a surrogate candidate, but the urge to control his own political party drove Roosevelt back to the campaign trail in In that year, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had steered the nation through the Great Depression of the s, won a third term and was elected in for a fourth term as well.

FDR was the first and only president to serve more than two terms. Passed by Congress in , and ratified by the states on February 27, , the Twenty-Second Amendment limits an elected president to two terms in office, a total of eight years.