I think the current system in the US is ridiculous. SC justices shouldn’t have the right to time their retirements which effectively gives them a say in who replaces them. They shouldn’t be the arbiters of when they are too old to continue. And 30+ years is too long for someone to remain in a position of such great power. A single non-renewable term of 15 years or so would be a much better solution. Perhaps that could be combined with an age limit of say 75 or 80. I agree though that it will be difficult to change. That is only likely if there is an egregious abuse of the current rules by some justice.
The problem with that had nothing to do with the age of the Justices, even as Roosevelt said it was. The Court was striking down his New Deal proposals consistently, and so he proposed to “pack the Court” by nominating a judge for every Justice over age 70, ostensibly to let them bow out gracefully but in reality to load up with Justices that wouldn’t shoot down his programs.
Everybody, and I mean everybody, saw through that charade for what it really was, and it did significant damage to Roosevelt’s credibility.
Putting an age limit on service is a one-time “court packing” plan, because the President that gets it passed in his term (all that is necessary is passage of a law to supersede the Judiciary Act of 1869) potentially gets to fix the Court however he wants to. Not cool. It’s one thing to have it fall into your lap, it’s another thing to fix the game with willful intent.
That isn’t the case, read the Constitution. Their term has no set end, but Congress is essentially the final authority on regulating the Supreme Court, and they have power to remove any justice they see fit for any reason they please.
How much of an issue do people think this is, by the way? A lot of people agreed Rehnquist should have stepped down before he died because he was very sick in his last couple of years, but many of these proposals wouldn’t have applied to Souter or O’Connor.
I don’t understand these comments. Are either or both of you suggesting that Congress can mandate a retirement age for judges by statute? Judges hold office “during good behavior”, and the only mechanism for dealing with “bad behavior” is the cumbersome process of impeachment and conviction. All the Judiciary Act does is allow judges who resign to collect a pension.
What would be the downside to having rotating, 27 years term of service with the longest serving judge being replaced? Start the process in a 10 years, and from there on every three years send a new one up to the bench.
No chance of reinstatement (so don’t even bother trying), it would give each president at least one chance to add or change the supreme court (with the occasional two choice term) and they would be serving long enough to effectively rule out any political gamesmenship or tomfoolery.
In the rare case that someone didn’t finish out their term, just run on 8 justices for until the next appointment and keep going from there. Or maybe the appointment could be the tenth ‘on deck’ justice, sitting on the court but unable to vote, either waiting for a sitting justice to die or stepping up to be a voting member of the court in 3 years after they were appointed.
Would go a long ways to keep the SC fresh, remain nonpolitical and prevent the randomness of who gets how many nominations.
Only in the sense that they can impeach any Federal judge or Justice they want.
As Article III, Section 1 says, “The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior.” That means what Freddy the Pig suggests: that as long as they aren’t guilty of some breach of good behavior that results in impeachment, they get to keep their seats on the Federal bench.
This seems like a solution in search of a problem. For those handful of times where someone who is senile and bat-shit crazy is on the bench, you’ve got 8 other justices to balance them out, and a Congress who can remove them from office if the problem is that extreme.
Can anyone point out a situation that has harmed the country because of the senility of a Justice?
I feel that they should be long term limits. No one, regardless of who it is, should not have to prove himself in a job. Oh yeah you could impeach them, but this is impractical.
Same with Congress, of course the argument is there are already term limits, called voting the guy out of office.
But it’s far too easy to work the system so once your elected you stay in. Politics is not a normal type job. Basically people are lazy and they do just enough to keep from getting fired, and this is whether your a politician or just an “average Joe,” type guy.
We need politicians that will do MORE than just the minimum. Like our Mayor Daley in Chicago, he’s been in office for 20 years.
It’s not that he is doing anything wrong, it’s just everything he does is marginal. So when it comes time to re-elect his defense is “Why not re-elect me, what have I done that is so bad.”
Well nothing, but no one ever seems to ask, “What have you done that is outstanding” and more importantly no one asks “How many others could be doing it MUCH better”?
Term limits would end this mediocracy. Of course the counter-argument is some outstanding people would be kicked out too. You are not wrong with that argument, but many more mediocre people would be forced out and the really strong ones would have made enough contacts so they could do a good job.
Take Hillary Clinton, just because she is no longer a senator, doesn’t mean she couldn’t find other useful work. A senator getting forced out of office doesn’t mean he couldn’t do other useful things or even better things to help his country.
You misunderstand. The harm is that by not being able to give the boot to Justices the President cannot pack the Court with his own guys. It has nothing to do with senility.
I suppose it’s not the same thing, but what I am suggesting is that a modification to the existing law can either shrink or grow the Court by adding an additional allotment of judges. Right now there are 9 (the Judiciary Act set it up that way, if you look), but that is not the Constitutionally-mandated number of Justices (the Constitution makes no such mandate). We could have as many as Congress approves. So hypothetically the President need only say to his party members in Congress, who have a filibuster-proof majority, that he wants it to add an additional Justice for every one over the age of 70 and it’s done.
It really could be that easy. It’s not mandated retirement, but it is a President with the Court in his back pocket, which to my eyes is a difference without a distinction because the outcome will be the same. And, of course, if he picks them all young, he sets it up for the next 30 years until his guys hit 70.
While Roosevelt’s plan was blatently political it was probably not unconstitutional. The Constitution says that judges cannot be removed from the court without cause. Roosevelt wasn’t trying to remove any justices - he was trying to add additional judges (so the incumbent judges would be outvoted by the new majority).
Roosevelt was probably inspired by the similar situation in the UK involving the Reform Act of 1832.
But that’s a horrible way to deal with the problem of over-age justices! (Which I agree is a problem, because relatively few people maintain the capacity to deal with a heavy workload and acute mental judgment into their 80’s.) First, it doesn’t solve the problem, because the elderly judge remains on the bench. Second, it grants a windfall to the incumbent President at the time the law is passed. I want a retirement age for all future appointments, starting now. Better yet, I want to phase in staggered, fixed terms to (a) spread the appointments more evenly among presidents; and (b) remove the incentive to name overly young justices.
Unfortunately, these changes require constitutional amendments, and will never happen.
I don’t know one. But I did mention Rehnquist, who was having severe health problems and missed a lot of time his last couple of years, but wouldn’t resign from the court. It was widely believed he refused to quit because he wanted to set the record for longest-serving chief justice.
If you have mediocre people in office, it doesn’t matter if they are new or old, and losing skilled people is always a loss.
And they still feel they are overworked. Which might be true; I have no way to know.
Overage justices are not a big problem. We have had a few, but not all that many. They also have a large staff of legal experts to assist them. They don’t fly solo. Some justices are competent at an advanced age. Some like Thomas were a horrible mistake . But there is no mechanism for getting them out. The idea is that they are supposed to be independent from the executive and legislative branches. If we pass a rule putting an age limit, it knocks down the wall. If we make them run for terms, we destroy it completely. They will have to be politicians as well as judges. It will make them dependent on pleasing the president and his party to get reappointed. The separation would be gone. It is a bad idea.
That’s how it works in Canada. It hasn’t been a problem (that I’m aware of) so far.
Yeah, that’s more or less what I said, though in retrospect it wasn’t clear. The issue wasn’t the cause of the justices being ‘augmented’, but that he suddenly got to add several people to the Court.
Yeah, that’s more or less what I said, though in retrospect it wasn’t clear. The issue wasn’t the cause of the justices being ‘augmented’, but that he suddenly got to add several people to the Court.
Not necessarily - it depends on the terms of the constitutional amendment.
For example, an amendment imposing an age limit could be modelled on the Twenty-Second Amendment, which created the term limit for the President. The term limit did not apply to the sitting President:
So if a constitutional amendment was passed implementing a mandatory retirement age of say, 75, but the amendment did not apply to anyone who held a federal judgeship at the time it was passed, there would not be any windfall for the President at the time the amendment passed. The amendment likely wouldn’t start to have much effect for several years - it would be a gradual phase-in process, as the judges who had life tenure gradually died off and new judges were appointed with the age limit.
How would an automatic retirement age affect their independence? If they Constitution bars anyone from being a federal judge after a certain age, there is no way that any politicians could extend a judge’s term. They would still have guaranteed tenure, subject only to impeachment, just for a fixed term rather than until death.
Why not amend the courts rules of procedure and allow for a bench of 3 or 5 or 7 or a full bench to hear the cases depending on the seriousness of the issue.