The editors of the Washington Post argue in favor of term limits for Supreme Court justices:
For their part, presidents increasingly search for relatively young, ideologically zealous nominees rather than those with the most judicious temperament. This has led to an ideological chasm on the court and provided an incentive for ambitious lower-court judges to adjust their rulings to please partisan activists.
Some Democrats believe the solution is to pack the court with Democratic nominees, expanding its size, while they still have congressional majorities. This would be a historic mistake. It would sap the court’s legitimacy for no long-term benefit; Republicans could re-pack the court the next time they controlled Congress and the White House.
The commission report points out that, while expanding the court is highly controversial, there is much wider and bipartisan agreement on imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices. Terms could be long — perhaps 18 years — and expire in a staggered manner so that an equal number of vacancies come up in every presidential term. This would lower the stakes of the court confirmation process, diminish actuarial tables and luck as factors in which presidents get to decide the court’s composition and guard against justices suffering from mental decline while still on the bench. Presidents would be freer to pick justices from more diverse backgrounds. More people would be able to serve on the court, so the preoccupations and quirks of a handful of lifetime appointees would no longer determine the law of the land.
I’m afraid that term limits would do little to solve the problem. Highly ideological justices lacking in judicial temperate or restraint may be newly appointed or long-serving. All that term limits would do in the absence of judicial restraint is enable continuous churn in the law which would bring the law itself into disrepute and society into chaos.
The underlying problems are the extreme polarization of politics these days which, if not more extreme than in the past is certainly more obvious than in the past, the reliance on the Court to effect social changes which legislators and executives lack the courage to make themselves, and changes in the practice of law over the years. Those won’t be solved by term limits. Imposing term limits just scratches the present itch.
One reason to have term limits on the Supreme Court (and Federal judges in general) is to avoid the “Ginsburg†situation — where judges stay on well past the point health issues are limiting their ability to do their job effectively.
I have kept pushing this before. The bigger (and easier) reform is to appoint more judges from other law schools then Yale and Harvard; and preferably from outside the big 14. Barrett was the first Supreme Court judge who did not study from Harvard or Yale since O’Connor.
I agree term limits are highly unlikely to limit the battles over the judiciary.
Term limits would help I think. At present you can get lucky and control the POTUS position for the right 4 or 8 years and then name enough justices to control the courts for 30 years or more. It also means we get more judges in their 40s. I would make it 10 years.
Steve
Just to put some context.
John Marshall was 46 when he became Chief Justice, he headed the Supreme Court for 34 years and he died in office.