If your spouse asked you point-blank if you were planning a sexy weekend with a co-worker and you gave that exhaling smile of an answer that Thune gave to a direct question about Trump 2028, odds are good divorce lawyers might be called.
The “Lindsey was joking” dodge wouldn’t cut it.
If I am betting, I am still betting against a 2028 run. But I have tripped over into the space that says such an attempt might be undertaken. Worse, I am at a point where I am not certain SCOTUS would stop it.
Don’t get me wrong, the text is quite clear,
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.
Still, it is a testament to our political moment that my mind turns to things like the Colombian Supreme Court ruling that a process to call a constitutional convention was constitutional because of an expression of popular will on the subject, which superseded the written document.* There, of course, are a variety of examples in authoritarian regimes wherein parchment barriers have simply been placed in a drawer for future use with little legal pretext at all.
The thing that this video clip tells me, however, isn’t that there will be such a breach of the Constitution. Rather, it just shows how much Thune fears Trump and is performing for him. He wants to avoid the possible wrath of Dear Leader.
This is not a healthy state for our democracy, and it is an ongoing illustration of how leaders in the Republican Party are so concerned about their own hold on power that they are willing to publicly humiliate themselves to pass loyalty tests with Trump. I am sure Thune tells himself it is the price he must pay to be in a position to do “good” or somesuch. But all I can say is these folks need to go read The Lord of the Rings and ruminate on why people like Gandalf and Galadriel wanted nothing to do with the One Ring, and how lusting for it (to do good!) drove Boromir mad.**
Side note: Bash and Thune sounds like a basic cable buddy cop show from the early 2000s.
*I paraphrase a process that took place in 1990 and led to the election of a constituent assembly, which rewrote the Colombian constitution in 1991.
**Apologies for crossing the streams of my polisci brain and my geek brain.
