Should the Supreme Court Have Term Limits?

What’s the story?

“Term limits, retirement at 80 for Congress, Supreme Court” -Washington Blade

“The Supreme Court Needs Term Limits” -New York Times

 “3 reasons the Supreme Court needs term limits” -The Daily Iowan

“Constitutional Remedies to a Lawless Supreme Court" -Ted Cruz, writing for The National Review in 2015

• Various opinion columnists in various publications are calling for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on SCOTUS justices.
• “No other major democracy has lifetime appointments to its highest court. Only the United States does, and it creates all kinds of problems,” David Leonhardt writes in his op-ed for the Times. He adds:

“The current system began, obviously, in the 18th century, when both politics and human lifespans were very different. It’s time for a change."

What are the arguments for term limits?

"Our system often does not respect the will of the people," -Leonhardt

• “Lifetime appointments don’t do what they’re supposed to do,” Elijah Helton writes in the Iowan. Their original purpose was to isolate justices from political influence, but it's resulted in the "big problem" that "federal judges don’t need to worry about the public because they aren’t elected officials.”
• “Political questions best settled by the ballot box - about abortion, for instance, or gay marriage - have become legal ones settled by nine unelected judges,” writes The Economist.
• Following the Supreme Court decisions to uphold Obamacare and legalize gay marriage, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-AZ) wrote in The National Review:

“The time has come…to recognize that the problem lies not with the lawless rulings of individual lawless justices, but with the lawlessness of the Court itself…A remedy is needed that will restore health to the sick man in our constitutional system. Rendering the justices directly accountable to the people would provide such a remedy.

Carter made 0 nominations; Nixon filled 4 seats

• “Rather than the Supreme Court’s makeup being determined by elections over many years, it’s based on a combination of those elections and the randomness of how long justices live,” Leonhardt writes.
• “The policy future of the country,” Norm Ornstein wrote in the Atlantic in 2014, “depends as much on the actuarial tables and the luck of the draw for presidents as it does on the larger trends in politics and society.”

Experience

• Presidents want their SCOTUS picks to serve as long as possible, so they can choose candidates that tend to be young; the average starting age of justices on the court is 51.
• “If we instituted term limits, the prioritization of relative youth can be replaced by an extra decade of wisdom and experience,” Helton explains.

What’s the solution?

• Many pundits propose term limits of about 18 to twenty years, which would mean each four-year presidential term automatically brings two appointments.
• “These limits would allow people to serve for what is generally considered a full generation,” Peter Rosenstein writes in LGBT outlet the Washington Blade.
• Cruz argued for “judicial retention elections” where every justice, “beginning with the second national election after his or her appointment, will answer to the American people and the states in a retention election every eight years.”
• Though it would take a constitutional amendment to enact any these changes, Leonhardt says, “that’s O.K.”

“The United States has already amended its Constitution 27 times — or an average of about once every nine years. We are overdue for at least one more amendment.”

What do you think?

Should the U.S. impose term limits on SCOTUS justices? What about “judicial retention elections”? Or do you favor the current system? Hit Take Action and tell your reps.

—Josh Herman

(Photo Credit: iStock.com / JPecha)