How long a president?

What's the maximum amount of time someone can serve as U.S. President?

If you're like most people -- including most well-educated people -- the answer isn't what you think it is.

This has been on my mind since I saw this Youtube short.

It's one of those videos where someone asks people some basic knowledge questions.One of the questions was: "In years, what's the maximum amount of time someone can swerve as U.S. President?" It's something I've addressed tangentially in this blog. And it interests me because almost everyone will get it wrong.

I'd be willing to bet that the questioner was looking for people to answer ten years. That's based on the 22nd Amendment, which set term limits for the Presidency. You can only be elected President twice. But if you serve as president for more than two years of someone else's term, you can only be elected once. So, the thinking goes, if you get elected Vice President and then move up to the presidency upon the death or resignation or -- I suppose -- impeachment, conviction and removal from office) of the President with exactly two years left in his term, you can still get elected to two four year terms and serve a total of ten years. If, when you move up, there are more than two years left, you can only get elected once, and therefore serve less than eight years.

But that answer isn't right. Suppose you serve the ten years as described above. Then, after you leave office, you get elected to Congress and become Speaker of the House,* and then the President and Vice President both die. In that event you become President again and you have now served more than ten years. You can't get elected President again. But after the end of the term you can become Speaker of the House again, and then elevated to the Presidency again. Since there's no limit to the number of times that pattern can be repeated, there is really no limit to how much time you can serve as President -- subject to the whims of mortality.

So the correct answer: There is no limit.

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*Someone told me that you don't actually have to be a Congresscritter to become Speaker of the House. I don't want to bother researching it, since it doesn't really affect the analysis