A Tennessee Republican congressman has jumped to an early lead in the race for the most Trump-sycophantic member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles, who earlier in the week introduced legislation that would give President Donald Trump the authority to annex Greenland, has proposed a bill that would amend the 22nd Amendment, which sets the current two-term limit for presidents.
Ogles’ bill would allow any president to serve a third term if their first two terms were non-consecutive. In American history only two presidents met that threshold: Donald Trump and Grover Cleveland, who lost his re-election bid to Benjamin Harrison in 1888 but won a rematch four years later.
“It is imperative that we provide President Trump with every resource necessary to correct the disastrous course set by the Biden administration,” Ogles said in a statement. “He is dedicated to restoring the republic and saving our country, and we, as legislators and as states, must do everything in our power to support him.”
Ogles’ plan prohibits a third term if the first two were consecutive — meaning former Presidents Bush, Obama and Clinton could not seek a return to office. The bill would also deny a third full term for anyone who has served more than two years of someone else’s term.
Here’s the 22nd Amendment, in its current state:
“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.”
Ratified in 1951, the 22nd Amendment came about after Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for election in 1932 and won before being reelected three times, making him the only president to serve more than two terms. And, yes, those were consecutive terms.
Now here’s Ogles’ proposed makeover, which won’t ever happen:
“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, 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 twice.”
Ogles’ amendment would require the approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of the states to be ratified, which should explain why our Constitution has so few amendments.
As Axios noted in its reporting, the bill served as a “marker of the depths of fealty the new president enjoys within the House GOP.”
Ogles is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, made up of the most loyal of Trump loyalists. But there is another reason the Tennessee congressman is competing so hard to be Trump’s biggest lickspittle.
He’s being investigated by the House Ethics Committee over discrepancies in his campaign funding disclosures — specifically in regard to a $320,000 personal loan he reported to the Federal Election Commission. Ogles, who last year pushed legislation to send pro-Palestinian student protesters to Gaza as “punishment,” later amended disclosures that reduced the personal loan total to $20,000. He has refused to cooperate with the federal probe.
A review by the Office of Congressional Ethics concluded there was “substantial reason to believe that Rep. Ogles omitted or misrepresented required information” on his financial disclosures.
Additionally, the OCE found “substantial reason to believe that Rep. Ogles’s campaign committee may have accepted excessive contributions that were reported as personal loans and contributions from the candidate.”
“I don’t think he wants to talk about the campaign finance fraud that he is accused of and would like us instead to focus on what a committed Trump sycophant he is,” Democratic Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont told Axios. “Truly pathetic. Voters from Tennessee deserve much better.
In a statement, Ogles’ fellow Tennessean Steve Cohen, a Democrat, wrote: “2 terms is enough chaos for any nation to endure.”
It’s unlikely any of this will do serious damage to Ogles’ political career. He easily won re-election in 2024 despite the ethics scandal and a host of other scandals, including false statements about his professional and educational background and qualifications, and what happened to $25,000 he raised on GoFundMe for a children’s burial garden that never materialized.
