Recent polling released by NBC News shows that only 22% of Americans have confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court. In the wake of that growing unpopularity, a new proposal in Congress would amend the Constitution to impose 18-year term limits on Supreme Court justices. Democratic Rep. Johnny Olszewski of Maryland joins "The Takeout" to discuss.
“The tenure in office of a justice of the Supreme Court may not exceed 18 years. In the case of any justice who is serving as of the ratification of this amendment, if the tenure in office of that justice is 18 years or more, that term of that justice shall be terminated. If such a justice is the Chief Justice, the position shall be filled in accordance with law.”
That’s the entirety of the proposed amendment.
Seems pretty straightforward. But do we really want to give Trump a chance to get 3 more justices that will rule the courts for the next 18 years?
Exactly. A phased rollout could give successive administrations opportunity to select their own. But let’s not be naïve: they’d all quit now to give their seats to Trump appointees.
“In the case of any justice who is serving as of the ratification of this amendment, if the tenure in office of that justice is 18 years or more, that term of the justice having the longest tenure shall be terminated immediately. Every two years thereafter the next longest tenured justice shall be teminated until such time no justice having over 18 years tenure remains.”
A better solution would be an expansion then contraction. Add 2 seats every two years for 6 years, then start removing at 18 years two years after we have 15 justices. Hopefully by that time most will have voluntary left anyway,and we will have had enough executive and congressional turnover to make this more fair and representative.
Good point about people resigning early. That would probably be a problem no matter what. If someone was at 16 years, they would probably be incentivized to retire early if they thought the next president wouldn’t be from their party.
Right now, judges almost never resign, so they just happen to die whenever most of the time, which allows conservatives to replace liberal judges and vice versa (in theory). Resigning early would likely be a huge problem.
Might have to do something like say each president gets to nominate a maximum of 2 justices. Those two justices being the people with the longest tenure on the court. If someone dies, that counts as nomination. If the president has already used their 2 nominations, then the next president will appoint a replacement.