Messages on social media claim that the US Supreme Court can extend President Trump’s term by up to three years if he is acquitted in the Senate.
President Donald Trump is, at the time of writing, facing an on-going impeachment trial by the lower chamber of Congress, the US House of Representatives. Impeachment is the first of a two step process to remove a president. If he is impeached, his case is moved to the upper chamber of Congress, the Senate, where they will vote on whether to convict – and as such remove – the president.
Impeachment alone does not mean a president will be removed, as highlighted by President Bill Clinton being impeached but not removed since the Senate voted to acquit him, and most political analysis suggests President Trump will also be acquitted if he is indeed impeached.
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A rumour has spread online claiming that if Trump is acquitted by the Senate, then the Supreme Court can move to extend his term limit by three years (currently presidents can only be elected to two four-year terms.)
Such rumours seem to have been started by an article that claims this is all possible because of a relic law passed during the Nixon presidency by a “Republican Congress” that allows a presidential term to be extended in the event of a Senate acquittal which was supposed to have expired but never was because Nixon resigned before the impeachment process could reach the Senate.
The article making this claim was originally posted on the site DailyWorldUpdate.us, and reads in part –
There’s a little-known precedent on the books that Democrats are trying desperately to have removed before the impeachment trial of President Trump begins. In 1974, as Nixon faced impeachment, the Republican Congress passed a law that would allow his term to be extended if he was acquitted.
…
The law was specific to Nixon, and was set to expire in 5 years, but Nixon resigned. The removal of the law, therefore, never happened.
It is all nonsense. No such law exists, and many of the people quoted in the article are not real, including legal analyst “Art Tubolls” (an anagram for Busta Troll, the pen name of the author.) The website DailyWorldUpdate.us is a spoof news website that labels its content as “satire”. However many readers have not seen the label, and other websites have copied the content and not included a disclaimer.
DailyWorldUpdate.us is a subsidiary of the “America’s Last Line of Defense” network of parody, satire, and tomfoolery,
Even if the website did not label its content as fiction, the article would still be demonstrably false since it claims that there was a Republican Congress during Nixon’s resignation that enabled this relic law to pass. But there was not a Republican Congress, since both chambers of Congress were held by comfortable Democratic majorities during the latter part of Nixon’s tenure. As such it’s rather unlikely that Congress would have allowed such a law to pass.
As such, this claim is demonstrably false and we don’t recommend circulating it.
This rumour bears similarity to another baseless claim that purported a president’s first term is nullified if he is impeached but acquitted in their first term.