Quote:
Originally Posted by Sea Dangles
When the rules don’t work for the left they want them to be changed.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device
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I didn't say it was new, it would take some of the political pressure off and make it so you can choose 60 year old citizens
Kennedy selected 2
Johnson 2
Nixon 4
Ford 1
Reagan 4
Bush 2
Clinton 2
Bush 2
Obama 2
Trump 2
Take it when you can get it, don't just blat
Conservatives have argued in favor of Supreme Court term limits for years, regardless of which party was in power.
In 2006, when Republicans had control of both the White House and Congress, legal scholars Steven Calabresi and James Lindgren released an influential paper entitled "Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered."
Calabresi is a conservative's conservative. He served in the Reagan and Bush administrations and co-founded the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that's helped guide Trump's judicial appointments.
In their paper, Calabresi and Lindgren report that, from 1789 to 1970, Supreme Court justices served an average of about 15 years and there was a vacancy every two years or so. "For those Justices who have retired since 1970, the average tenure has jumped to 26.1 years," they said. "Because of the long tenure of recent members of the Court, there were no vacancies on the high Court from 1994 to the middle of 2005."
Their suggested solution? Term limits. "A system of staggered, eighteen-year term limits for Supreme Court Justices…whose terms would be staggered such that a vacancy would occur on the Court every two years."
This approach has long had fans on the Right. Texas Gov. Rick Perry made it part of his 2012 presidential race platform. Scholars at the conservative American Enterprise Institute like the idea, and conservative media figures like Mike Huckabee and Mark Levin back term limits, too.
However, while the Right and the Left may be on the same page regarding term limits for SCOTUS judges, their motives are miles apart. The argument from the Right has been that the court has too much power and too frequently operates as an unelected legislature. As a result, every appointment is a political fight to the death, focused almost entirely on the ideological impacts of the future, rather than the resume and legal reasoning of the nominee today. Knowing that there will be a new vacancy on the court every two years will reduce the political rancor and, conservatives hope, pare back the politics that have infected the one branch of government that is supposed to be beyond partisanship.
Ending life tenure for SCOTUS justices would also promote the "consent of the governed" many conservatives have advanced, as opposed to the "angels to govern us" approach rejected by Thomas Jefferson as a form of judicial tyranny. Some conservatives like Sen. Ted Cruz have even proposed "judicial retention elections" that would allow a popular vote on the performance of each Supreme Court justice.