
Why Did Prohibition Pass and Then Collapse So Fast?
Akhil Reed Amar, in this installment of his Yale course America's Written Constitution, examines Prohibition and presidential term limits as linked constitutional puzzles. He traces the Eighteenth Amendment to Progressive Era reform, backed by the temperance movement and opposed by a liquor lobby wary of women's suffrage, then explains its swift repeal as a story about process: malapportioned rural legislatures passed it, while the Twenty-First Amendment went instead to specially elected state conventions closer to one person, one vote. The second half follows the two-term tradition from Washington's voluntary retirement through the ambiguous tests posed by Grant, Cleveland, and Theodore Roosevelt, to Franklin Roosevelt's four terms and the resulting Twenty-Second Amendment. Amar closes on an unintended consequence, that barring a third term pushes presidents to extend influence by proxy through their chosen vice president, a dynamic he ties to the rising rate of vice presidents winning their party's nomination since term limits began.