Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) slammed GOP lawmakers on Wednesday for laughing off President-elect Donald Trump for floating a third term in office.
“His jokes are not jokes. Nobody takes them as jokes. They are trial balloons,” Goldman told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
“They are very intentionally designed to soften the response and then to normalize his unconstitutional and anti-democratic goals.”
Trump, in a meeting with House Republicans on Wednesday, said he suspects he wouldn’t be “running again” unless someone told him he was “so good we’ve got to figure something else out.”
Republicans reportedly appeared to take the comment as a joke, according to The New York Times.
Trump has previously mused about being in office beyond a second term in a move that would violate the 22nd Amendment.
Goldman planned to introduce a resolution on the House floor Thursday to clarify that the 22nd Amendment “applies to two terms in the aggregate” in an effort to remove any constitutional loophole, the Times reported.
Goldman, in a social media post, shared the Times article on his resolution and wrote that the United States is a “nation of laws, not kings.”
“The 22nd Amendment is clear that no person can be elected President more than twice,” he wrote. “Any attempt by Donald Trump to do so is blatantly unconstitutional, and I call on my colleagues – D or R – to stand by their oath to defend the Constitution.”
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The congressman told Hayes that the amendment is already “very clear” so it should be “very easy” for every Republican in Congress to vote in favor of his resolution.
″[Trump] has ‘joked’ about many different things including, as I remember in 2018, he joked about pardoning himself and then that became completely normalized and everyone just expected him to pardon himself if he won this time,” Goldman said.