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Michael Korzi's Presidential Term Limits in American History traces the politics of presidential terms and tenure from the American Founding to the second term of George W. Bush. This book makes three important contributions to the study of the American presidency: it offers the first truly comprehensive, systematic understanding of the debates over term limits throughout American history; it engages with the connection between term limits and presidential power; and it considers the legacy of Founding decisions for contemporary politics. On the first two, this book delivers nicely. On the third idea--perhaps the most theoretically ambitious and controversial--it engages the reader in the question, but doesn't quite deliver a satisfying conclusion.
In the first part of the book, Korzi presents the debate over term length, re-eligibility, and method of selection (direct popular election, selection by the legislature, or the eventual winner, indirect election). These practical questions of institutional design are placed in the context of selection methods for state executives as well as competing schools of thought about the proper role of the national executive. A table on page 37 neatly illustrates how the design that came out of the Philadelphia discussion represents a midpoint between different views of power and democracy in executive politics. The absence of formal term limits in this arrangement gave rise to the "two-term tradition" in the nineteenth century. Korzi devotes a chapter to this period, between...