The Contemporary Presidency: “An Excess of Refinement”: Lame Duck Presidents in Constitutional and Historical Context

Abstract

Well into President George W. Bush's second term, history appears to be repeating itself—second terms are far more problematic than first terms. Are problematic second terms inevitable, and if so are they caused by the Twenty‐second Amendment? In this article I explore the constitutional and historical dynamics of presidential term limits, focusing on the leadership and clerkship roles the president performs in the constitutional system, constrained by the dynamics of political time. The article examines the classic arguments for and against term limits, comparing Hamilton's focus on stability to Jefferson's concern for tyranny. It then surveys the scholarship on second term problems to tease out the effects of term limits from the more general problem of second terms. I conclude with an analysis of second term and term limit problems from a political time perspective, suggesting that presidents are more constrained in the pursuit of their constitutional functions by the dynamics of regime cycles than they are by term limits. It appears that term limits add little to the functions of the presidency in the constitutional order.

Lame‐Duck Foreign Policy

“…While the weakness is generally agreed upon, the extent to which it is the product of term limits or the broader political cycle is a matter of some contention. Crockett (), for example, examines the impact of the Twenty‐Second Amendment and argues that term limits do relatively little to alter the political system—they have some impact on presidential agenda‐setting efficacy in the second term but that decline is mitigated by the availability of other executive tools. Directly relating to the argument made here, however, Combs () argues that the natural ebb and flow of regime cycles means that domestic agendas tend to fall by the wayside at the end of administrations while foreign policy remains relatively more intact.…”

Interbranch cooperation and the shadow of the future

“…A conventional hypothesis is that lame-duck chief executives suffer a loss of legislative cooperation. But that is tantamount to our future-shadow explanation, and to our knowledge it has not been seriously tested, except by Crockett (2008) and Klarner and Karch (2008), who find scant support, or subsumed under any wider model of cooperation. 1 Maybe the governor has worked extra hard near the end to leave a legislative legacy.…”

Changes in the Rules of the Lawmaking Process and the Success of Presidential Bills: Chile, 1990–2018

“…The electoral calendar has been found to affect the success of the president’s agenda (Alemán and Calvo, 2010; Barrett and Eshbaugh‐Soha 2007). When the end of the term is near, the government has less power to advance the president’s agenda (Canes‐Wrone and de Marchi 2002; Crockett 2008; Sullivan and de Marchi 2011), while governments are more successful during their honeymoons (Alemán and Navia 2009)—though the honeymoon effect might be conditioned by levels of public opinion polarization (Franklin and Fix 2016). Still, we would expect that the point in a president’s tenure—honeymoon, middle years, or last year—will impact the success of the president’s agenda.…”