At 07:20 PM 7/1/2003 -0400, Robert Justin Lipkin wrote:
Was there much discussion--in or out of the Constitutional
Convention--about the number of years of a President's term? Is
there any literature examining this question and revealing why the
Founders chose a term of four years? Was there any discussion about
limiting the number of terms a President could serve?
There was
a great deal of discussion of all of this at Philadelphia. A good
brief treatment is by Shlomo Slonim, "Designing the Electoral
College," in Cronin, ed.,
Inventing the American Presidency
(Kansas, 1989). Slonim describe three considerations as forming a
"tripod" requiring a balance among the legs: "the mode of
election, the term of office, and reeligibility." For
instance, if one or both of the houses of Congress were to elect the
president, he should be limited to a single term, and the term should
therefore be lengthy--six or more years. If the term should be
shorter, then he should be reeligible, but then he should be elected in
some other fashion. And so on. The framers went round and
round on this, and the electoral college was the solution for one leg of
the tripod that resolved the problems of the other two.
Matt Franck
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Matthew J. Franck
Professor and Chairman
Department of Political Science
Radford University
P.O. Box 6945
Radford, VA 24142-6945
phone 540-831-5854
fax 540-831-6075
e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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