Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution
As worded, the primary focus of the 22nd Amendment is on limiting individuals twice elected to the presidency from being elected again. Due to this, several issues could be raised regarding the amendment's meaning and application, especially in relation to the 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, which states, "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States". While it is clear that under the 12th Amendment the original constitutional qualifications of age, citizenship, and residency apply to both the president and vice president, it is unclear whether someone who is ineligible to be elected president could be elected vice president. Because of this apparent ambiguity, there may be a loophole in the 22nd Amendment whereby a two-term former-president could be elected vice president and then succeed to the presidency as a result of the incumbent's death, resignation, or removal from office (or even succeed to the presidency from some other stated office in the presidential line of succession).
Term limits in the United States
When the states ratified the Constitution (1787–88), several leading statesmen regarded the lack of mandatory limits to tenure as a dangerous defect, especially, they thought, as regards the presidency and the Senate. Richard Henry Lee viewed the absence of legal limits to tenure, together with certain other features of the Constitution, as "most highly and dangerously oligarchic". Both Jefferson and George Mason advised limits on reelection to the Senate and to the Presidency, because said Mason, "nothing is so essential to the preservation of a Republican government as a periodic rotation". The historian Mercy Otis Warren, warned that "there is no provision for a rotation, nor anything to prevent the perpetuity of office in the same hands for life; which by a little well-timed bribery, will probably be done".