I think 18 years is too long – it still makes the influence massive and multi-decade. If it’s 9 years, then there’s an open seat every year, and I think it would become pretty routine.
But I’d support 18 years over the status quo.
No, I was just imagining a world where there were no hypotheticals.
Regards,
Shodan
It advances liberals because liberal advances by the SC are harder to roll back - these are cause and effect, not two separate things.
Your proposal promotes more rapid turnover on the SC. This means that a president who serves 8 years would on average replace 8 of 9 justices, and even a one-termer would replace 4, on average. Which means that the SC would go through periods of overwhelming dominance by one ideology, much more than is the case today. This would promote more “extreme” ideological rulings by the SC. Because liberal rulings are more likely to “stick”, this would push things to the left.
So the way it would work out is that any time a Democrat would get elected, the court would shift significantly to the left. This would result in all sorts of liberal principles being declared basic rights enshrined in the constitution etc., which would then be hard to undo (even when the court later lurched to the right), as we’ve seen in the decades since this approach came into fashion.
I’m don’t agree that “liberal rulings are more likely to stick”, but even if this were the case, this could be mitigated by making the court larger – for example, 17 justices, with 17 year terms… then no single President could appoint a majority.
18 years is not that much more than the average SC justice term since 1970 (26 years or so). Too long.
I support the 9 year term you suggested (that is extensible by 1 year every time a justice dies) - that also has the advantage of justices’ deaths not screwing up the appointment schedule too much.
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And I think both of you guys are at least implicitly assuming that either (1) nobody’s going to fail to finish out their terms, or (2) you’ll have to have Justices who come on to just finish up part of someone else’s term. #1 would be a pretty reliable bet under 9-year terms, but not so much for 18-year terms. And #2 kinda denigrates the Supreme Court: who’d want to be nominated for the Supreme Court just to fill out someone else’s term, unless they figured that they weren’t very likely to get nominated for a term of their own?
IMHO, 9 years is WAY too short for a SCOTUS term, and even 18 years is shorter than I’d like to see. I think Justices very often get a deeper perspective as time goes along.
But I do think there needs to be some sort of term limit just to keep one side or the other from picking really young nominees for the Supreme Court with the notion that their guy will be there for the next 40 years. I’m thinking a max in the 25-30 year range would be a good thing. (But no need to make it 27 just to be divisible by 9, for reason #2 above.)
My suggestion accounted for deaths – every slot is 9 years (minimum) – upon a death, that slot becomes the newest open one, with all the others sliding back a single year. Thus, no matter if there are deaths or not, every year there is a new nomination and confirmation hearing for a 9 year term. And deaths during 9 year terms would be a lot less likely than during lifetime terms.
Alternately, I suggested a minimum age of 70. My point is that with very long terms, each individual open seat becomes enormously important to each political side, and thus partisanship overwhelms the possibility of nominating for experience, background, and the like. This bad influence wouldn’t be eliminated under my suggestions, but I think it would be greatly weakened.
iiandyiiii solved that problem in another thread - if a justice dies, the court stays at 8 until next justice’s appointment time, then a new justice gets nominated/approved, and everyone else’s terms get bumped up one year.
Maybe we should make a Constitutional amendment to only allow unicorns on the Supreme court. While they are effectively immortal by human standards, they have a strong reputation of non-partisanship and being tough but fair.
Their known attraction to virgins would seem to be just asking for a sex scandal. No thanks!
There is a tendency for the recognition of human rights and dignity to stick, so FP has a point that once someone has been recognized as having a worth and rights as a fellow human being, it’s a bit hard to peel that back.
At this point, just repealing SSM would cause severe blowback to the republicans, not to mention either repealing Roe v. Wade, or taking Bricker’s pet idea of using the SC to outlaw abortion across the land. I suppose that if the SC stayed in the hands of the far right long enough, we’d also see the reverse of loving v virginia, brown v education, as well as finishing off the voting rights act, and finding federal desegregation laws to be unconstitutional. These are all “liberal ideas” that were fought against tooth and nail by conservatives (I am removing party names, as the parties have drastically changed their platforms in the intervening years) that have “stuck” so far.
Every step of that, whether won in the legislature or the courts or through state by state has been resisted. Every step has been threatened to be reversed, but after a generation or so of recognizing the “new” rights, the idea of rolling back and removing rights from individuals does not generally sit well with not only the individuals who are being demoted, but often doesn’t sit well with others who may be concerned about where this rolling back of rights of citizens ends. If in the one direction, you have rights being granted to more and more individuals, then you would have to have a twisted worldview to see that as a threat to your own rights, but if rights are being stripped away from other groups and individuals, then you should probably be more than a bit concerned that you as an individual or member of a group may have your rights stripped away.
Be the change you want to see.
You should have little problem getting such a bill passed through any Congress. :smack:
I forgot… difficult things shouldn’t be brought up in discussions. Better off just not talking about anything that might be challenging to accomplish.
Or did you have a different point?
Changing the way that SCOTUS is appointed and adding terms would need more than a bill in congress.
You would need an actual amendment to the constitution.
You are mostly correct. The Constitution says that Supreme Court justices and federal judges serve their terms during good behavior (and that their compensation cannot be cut), which I don’t see a way to interpret away.
But the way that justices are confirmed could be changed - the Senate sets its own rules on how it gives its advice and consent.
Regards,
Shodan
Heck, there’s no constitutional requirement limiting membership of SCOTUS to nine people, either, as FDR famously noted at a time when SCOTUS was similarly perceived as being overly partisan. It’s a mistake to assume to current situation is particularly new. Even the Garland-ducking tactic isn’t original.
Joe Manchin tweet, 4:15 PM today:
Thanks, Joe! 
Nothing in that, IMO. He’s up for re-election in a hugely Republican state, and the Democrats likely don’t need his vote.
So where are we at on the filibuster vote count? Gorsuch needs 8 Dems to vote yes on cloture. Who does he have so far? Manchin, Heitkamp, and Leahy? Who’s left on the fence? Tester, McCaskill, Donnelly, Bennet, King, and Feinstein? Maybe Coons?