Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin asked Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor about the potential for President Donald Trump to run for a third term during a Tuesday appearance on “The View.”
Griffin suggested that Republicans would support Trump if he attempted to run for a third term, despite the 22nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution forbidding a president from serving more than two terms. Sotomayor said that a limited two-year term is not “settled law” because no president has ever challenged that amendment.
“There has been talk that Donald Trump might run for a third term in office. It is my personal belief that if he did, the Republican Party would likely support him. I want to ask obviously, the 22nd Amendment prohibits somebody from seeking a third term in office. Do you believe the 22nd Amendment is settled law?” Griffin asked.
“The Constitution is settled law. No one has tried to challenge that. Until somebody tries, you don’t know. It’s not settled because we don’t have a court case about that issue. But, it is in the Constitution and one should understand that there’s nothing that is the greater law in the United States than the Constitution of the United States,” Sotomayor said.
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Trump has not rejected the idea of possibly running for a third term and told NBC News’ Kristen Welker in March that he is “not joking” about the possibility.
“A lot of people want me to do it,” Trump said. “But, I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go. You know, it’s very early in the administration … I’m not joking.”
The 22nd Amendment states that “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” making Trump’s chances of ever running for a third term very slim. Law professor and ABC News contributor Kim Wehle insinuated in March that the Supreme Court may allow Trump to run for a third term since the justices unanimously ruled that Colorado, Maine and Illinois could not remove Trump from the ballot under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Sotomayor, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, has written several dissents in connection to Trump’s cases and policies. After the high court granted the Trump administration’s request to remove restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) immigration raids in Los Angeles, California, Sotomayor wrote in her dissent on Monday that agents would target Latinos and Spanish-speaking labor workers.
The liberal justice also wrote a scathing dissent after the high court ended lower courts’ abilities to issue nationwide injunctions to block the administration’s policies. Sotomayor wrote that the majority’s ruling proved that the “rule of law is not a given” in the U.S.
Sotomayor further said in April that allowing the administration to use a wartime authority to deport members of Tren de Agua “poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law.”
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