The Rove Scandal and the Twenty Second Amendment

There's a structural issue lurking behind the developing scandal over Karl Rove.

We don't know whether the revelations about Rove will blow over, or whether they will turn into a full blown scandal that damages Bush's second term. But it's not entirely an accident that a dangerous scandal has emerged in Bush's second term, rather than his first.

As my colleague Akhil Amar has pointed out to me, since the ratification of the Twenty Second Amendment in 1951, there have been five presidents who have won two terms to whom the Amendment applied. The first was Eisenhower, who had his share of political problems in his second term, and some minor scandals involving his chief of staff, Sherman Adams, but not the serious problem of scandal that would plague later two term presidents. The real effect of the Twenty Second Amendment came later: Nixon resigned in disgrace in his second term, Reagan's presidency was debilitated by the Iran-Contra Scandal which blew up in his second term, and we all know what happened to Clinton in his second term. Bush is the fifth such president.

A president's political enemies are always trying to uncover scandals (or make them up out of whole cloth) so that they can undermine him. And there is almost always something that a President or his aides do that is scandal-worthy (or can be made to seem so), although I freely admit that some Administrations are worse than others in this respect. As a result, what makes a scandal serious as opposed to merely inconvenient is whether the President has (a) allies who will stand up for him and/or work hard to nip things in the bud, and (b) whether he has the political clout to punish people if he survives the scandal.

Amar's point (developed in his forthcoming book, America's Constitution: A Biography, pp. 437-38) is that Presidents in their first term are expected to run for a second term, so they can always credibly threaten to punish their political enemies; and their allies, knowing this, will work even harder to defend the President when scandals arise and nip potential scandals in the bud. After the twenty second amendment, however, presidents in their second term can no longer credibly threaten that they will be around to punish those who dare to attack them. This is just another consequence of being a (constitutionally mandated) lame duck.

That doesn't mean, of course, that all second term Presidents from now on will have their second terms consumed by serious scandals (or impeachment). It merely means that they are far more politically susceptible to these scandals than Presidents were before the Twenty Second Amendment. Add to that changes in communications technology and the culture of press coverage, and you get a dangerous mixture for second term Presidents. I suspect, although I cannot be certain, that if Reagan had been President in the age of the Internet, Iran-Contra would have caused him even more problems than it did, and that other scandals-- particularly those involving his aides, who seemed always to be in trouble-- might have gotten a firmer footing in the public mind. Clinton was the first President during the age of the Internet. His two terms were full of allegations and scandals, but it's worth noting that it was only after his reelection in 1996 that he got into serious trouble.

Having a Vice President who can succeed a two term President offers much less protection from scandal than you might think. The Vice President has his own agenda, and has to balance loyalty to his boss with whether he wants to be tarnished by his boss if the scandal grows. So he is much less likely to offer a credible threat to punish the scandal mongers if he becomes President. Even if he wins, he will likely not wish to waste political capital on fighting his precedessor's fights. In addition, many of the President's political allies will have presidential ambitions (or will work for those who do) and so they will be less interested in sacrificing themselves to protect the President in his second term. Al Gore's decision to distance himself from Clinton is a good example of this phenomenon.

In this one respect Bush is even more vulnerable than Clinton was. Bush deliberately chose not to have a Vice President who could succeed him. So he is even less able to mount a credible threat of retribution for what happens in his second term. Rather, Bush's source of protection may be the fact that his brother Jeb can credibly threaten to succeed him. But this requires that most people-- including both the President's enemies and his Republican allies-- believe that Jeb will be running in 2008 and that he is likely to win. And, once again, the problem is that many of his allies will be running for the same office and will be less likely to want to sacrifice themselves either to protect Bush's second term or to help his brother Jeb win in 2008.