David Graham

There is not a way for a president to run for a third term.

It's also very clear that the Constitution is intended to bar, you know, these weird maneuvers that have been discussed, for example, where Trump would run as a vice presidential candidate and then whoever was at the top of the ticket would resign and let him take over.

So the authority isn't there.

But Trump has also tried in many cases to overstep his authority to do things that he doesn't have the power to do.

And he's been stopped by the courts or, you know, the courts have allowed things to go forward on a temporary basis.

So not worried that there's some legal maneuver that would work.

What they're worried is that he might do it and there might be no one who was able or willing to stop him from running for a third term.

And this gets very technical, but there are questions of how, for example, you would disqualify a Trump third term given prior litigations about the 14th Amendment and whether Trump could be disqualified before the 2024 race.

It quickly gets very weedy, even though the Constitution is so clear.

There are a lot of people who argued that because the 14th Amendment barred insurrectionists, which was a post-Civil War way to disqualify former Confederates from office, they said that Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election

qualifying him as an insurrectionist.

And as a result, he should not be allowed on ballots.

And we saw efforts in some states to remove him from the ballot.

And those went to the Supreme Court, which ruled basically that states don't have a lot of authority to do that on their own unless the federal government, in particular Congress, has already deemed somebody to have been involved in an insurrection.

So the question is then, would Congress say that Trump couldn't run for a third term?

And if they didn't, is there any enforcement mechanism?

It's interesting to see what's going on now in Congress, where there has been a Democrat elected in the special election in Arizona, Adelita Grijalva, who has not yet been seated in the House simply because Speaker Mike Johnson refuses to seat her.

So one concern is if there is an election that is not certified in time and the majority is Republican, could they elect Speaker Mike Johnson and then refuse to later seat Democrats who have been elected?

It's a little bit of a complicated scenario, but that's a possibility.

The other question is what Trump might try to do to consolidate power ahead of the seating of a new house sort of in that lame duck period.