Cartoon: Arts and crafts
A cartoon by Clay Bennett.
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Here’s how Trump could pull off an authoritarian third term
The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, 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 once.”
Seems pretty clear-cut, right?
But read carefully—”no person shall be elected” to the office. And therein lies the keys to Donald Trump’s fantasies of a third term, saying to NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday, “There are methods which you could do it.”
So how exactly would Trump become president without being elected president?
One way, Trump said, would be to swap tickets with Vice President JD Vance. He would run on a ticket with Vance and get elected vice president. Then, Vance would give up the office out of the goodness of his heart and resign, or maybe Trump would just shiv him, who knows. Trump wouldn’t care either way. Regardless, he would then become president.
Except that won’t work.
The 12th Amendment says, “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”
Well, that seems pretty clear-cut, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, that’s not the only avenue for Trump to try and sneak in.
The current order of presidential succession is:
Vice President
Speaker of the House
President Pro Tempore of the Senate
Secretary of State
We’ve already noted that the first is clearly off the table. However, the rest are not.
The Constitution doesn’t actually set requirements for speaker of the House, saying only, “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”
While every speaker has been a member of the House, it’s clear that there’s nothing requiring that to be the case. Hence, a Republican House could simply elect Trump as speaker, and then elevate him after both the president and the vice president resigned to pave his return to power.
A plain text reading of the Constitution makes this absolutely possible, though the courts would have to wrestle with the intent of both the 12th and the 22nd Amendments—which collectively make clear that really, two presidential terms is enough. But in this case, Trump wouldn’t be elected to the presidency, he would be elevated to the job.
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The more practical impediment to this scenario is that two people would now need to surrender their chances to be president of the United States so fucking Trump could continue trashing the country and the world. People don’t want that , not even Republicans, and that’s before Trump’s policies really do a number on our economy.
Not to mention, those two people will both have gone through a grueling national campaign, won the votes of tens of millions, and for what? To quit and give it all up right after taking the oath to office?
Moving down the list, president pro tempore of the Senate is supposed to preside over the Senate in the absence of the vice president (hence the Latin “for the time being”), which the Constitution pretends is the president of the Senate (and in practice, just means a tie-breaking vote if necessary).
Like the House speaker, the Constitution doesn’t provide any qualifications for the role , so by tradition, the majority party picks its oldest member for the mostly ceremonial position. It is currently Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.
Presumably a Republican Senate could pick Trump as president pro tempore. But that would require the House to be in Republican hands as well, otherwise a Democratic speaker would ascend to the top. At that point, assuming the whole Republican Party is singing from the same choir book, it would just be easier for the House to make him speaker.
And finally, there’s that secretary of state job. Imagine Trump as secretary of state? Dear god. In any case, it would be a short-term charade. But now you’re talking about four people giving up their chance to be president—the elected president, the elected vice president, the speaker of the House, and the president pro tempore of the Senate. Trump may be deluded enough to think that many people would clear the path for him, but that would fly in the face of human nature. A not-president Trump would have zero leverage over an actual president.
And of course, that’s still assuming that the effort would survive legal challenges based on the 22nd Amendment. After all, it’s clear what the framers of that amendment intended—to prevent another Franklin D. Roosevelt from happening. That is, to prevent another president from entrenching themselves in the Oval Office.
But it does say a lot about Trump that rather than focus on the job at hand, he’s obsessing over a third term. He wants power for the sake of power itself, jealous of despots like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Of course, he’s going to indulge in these sorts of fantasies.
Musk must pay, DOGE steals a building, and Big Law bends another knee
Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.
Wasn’t it a delight to see Elon Musk face-plant in his attempt to buy a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat? It has to irk Musk that there’s an election he couldn’t buy, even after being allowed to try to bribe Wisconsin voters with cold hard cash.
Musk’s humiliation shouldn’t stop there, though. Just because Musk’s preferred candidate didn’t prevail shouldn’t insulate him from criminal prosecution in the state.
Before the election, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul brought a lawsuit against Musk, asking the court for an emergency injunction. After the Wisconsin Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s denial of that injunction, Musk was allowed to continue his blatant vote buying.
The important thing here is that Kaul’s lawsuit was civil, not criminal. The goal was to stop Musk from handing out money so he couldn’t continue to try to influence the election. Although that request for emergency relief was unsuccessful, that isn’t the same thing as a ruling that Musk broke no laws.
Wisconsin election law classifies giving someone anything of value to induce them to vote or not to vote as election bribery. A violation is a Class 1 felony. There’s no reason not to pursue criminal charges. Musk is going to keep doing this until he’s stopped. He did it in Pennsylvania with no consequences, although he now faces a lawsuit over his failure to pay a canvasser $20,000 for all the petition signatures—at $100 a pop—he obtained.
Musk bought the presidential election . Federal courts are either cowed by Donald Trump or in thrall to him. But that’s not the case with state courts. And since Musk failed to tip the Wisconsin Supreme Court back to conservative control, it isn’t a situation where he might be convicted at a lower court but the state’s highest court would come through and do him a solid. Anyone who wasn’t Musk couldn’t get away with this, and he shouldn’t either.
Habeas games: Heads the administration wins, tails immigrants lose
The Trump administration has admitted it mistakenly deported someone to Venezuela but now claims it has no power to get him back because he’s outside the jurisdiction of the United States. It’s all thanks to this One Weird Habeas Trick.
The government is arguing the only way Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia could obtain relief from being illegally deported is to file a writ of habeas corpus. That’s the traditional way for immigrants to fight being unlawfully detained by the government—a much nicer way of saying “illegally imprisoned.” At the same time, the government is arguing that no United States court could now hear Garcia’s habeas claim, even if he had filed one, because Garcia is no longer in United States custody.
If it looks like a catch-22, and walks like a catch-22, it’s a catch-22 . Let’s say an unlawfully detained immigrant challenges their detention by filing a habeas claim while still stateside. Then, let’s say the government does exactly what it did when it ignored U.S. Judge James Boasberg’s order in a different immigration case and sends that immigrant to El Salvador illegally anyway while the case is pending.
Then, according to the government, even if they acknowledge that person shouldn’t have been deported and even if they acknowledge that person had a habeas claim pending, it doesn’t matter. The right to pursue that habeas claim vanishes because the immigrant isn’t here any longer.
There’s no way to read this bit of cynical subterfuge as anything but an assertion by the government that it can disappear whoever it wants, and there is no real recourse once it does so. Trump has made clear he thinks he can act like a king , and what’s more king-like than being able to banish someone?
Late Friday, a lower court declined to entertain the administration’s novel legal theory that disappearing Garcia in error, without due process, should just be treated as an unfortunate event that sadly cannot be fixed.
Instead, U.S. Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Garcia no later than April 7, at 11:59 PM. The big question now, of course, is whether the Trump administration will defy the court’s order anyway.
A federal judge is cool with DOGE straight-up stealing a building
Apparently, demolishing the U.S. Institute for Peace’s work wasn’t enough, so the Department of Government Efficency took their building too. And thanks to how they did it, a federal judge won’t stop it.
Earlier this week, Judge Beryl Howell declined to block the government from just taking the USIP building and sliding possession of it over to the Government Services Administration. Yes, even though USIP is not an agency , but is instead a private, nonprofit corporation created and funded directly by Congress. And yes, this is even though USIP’s building is worth $500 million.
The judge’s decision was partly based on the fact that the government had already transferred the building and everything in it last weekend, before the court hearing. So, Howell concluded, nothing was left to transfer, so any relief requested by the USIP plaintiffs was moot.
So the government has gotten away with what feels a lot like robbery by force. Really, really terrific system we’ve got here.
Big Law watch: Who bent the knee this week?
It’s getting hard to keep track of which law firms have agreed to pay off the president in the hopes he will leave them alone.
Last week, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom agreed to give the administration $100 million in pro bono work so that he wouldn’t target the firm with an executive order.
Apparently, Skadden has now set the going rate. This week, the law firm Milbank gave Trump another $100 million in free legal services and the now-customary promises to axe diversity efforts. The firm was likely in Trump’s crosshairs for hiring Neal Katyal , a big Trump critic and an acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama.
Willkie, Farr & Gallagher also raced to give the administration money. Worried they’d be targeted over hiring Doug Emhoff, the husband of former Vice President Kamala Harris, Willkie also cut basically the same deal as Skadden and Milbank. It’s all complying in advance and it’s all terrible and it’s not going to stop.
Cartoon: Hole-in-one
A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.
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