When President-elect Donald J. Trump met with House Republicans on Wednesday morning, he suggested he might need their help to try to circumvent the Constitution and run for a third term in the future — a comment that was met with laughter by his friendly audience.
“I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, ‘He’s so good we’ve got to figure something else out,’ ” Mr. Trump told Republicans, who appeared to take it as a joke.
One Democrat is moving quickly to make sure that cannot happen. Representative Dan Goldman of New York plans on Thursday to introduce a resolution clarifying that the Constitution’s two-term limit for presidents applies even if the terms are not consecutive. It asserts that the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which states that a person who has been elected president twice cannot run again, “applies to two terms in the aggregate” and leaves no loophole.
In other words, Mr. Trump — who served from 2017 to 2021 and is slated to assume the presidency again in January — could not seek another term in the future.
Mr. Goldman’s resolution, which was obtained by The New York Times, also reaffirms that the 22nd Amendment applies to Mr. Trump.
There is little chance that Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, would bring such a resolution to the floor for a vote.
But Mr. Goldman’s resolution is an early indication of how Democrats may try to hold Mr. Trump accountable and defend democratic institutions with Republicans fully in control of Congress and few guardrails remaining to rein him in. Introducing the measure allows Mr. Goldman to draw public attention to Mr. Trump’s statements, which he calls “anti-democratic and authoritarian.”…