Opinion: Supreme Court term limits wouldn’t solve anything
“In fact, in its survey of the existing literature on Supreme Court term limits, the Commission discovered few works arguing against term limits,” the draft said.
Let me help fill that void. Eighteen-year terms, however spaced and staggered, will cure none of the faults and only exacerbate the weaknesses that critics perceive in the modern court. They will make the institution appear more, not less, political in the eyes of the public. Confirmation battles will become more numerous but no less feverish, because 18 years is long enough to inflame partisan confirmation passions, especially if the court is closely divided.
One of the arguments for term limits is that the current system encourages presidents to select unduly youthful nominees, to maximize the time they will have on the bench. What in the world is wrong with youth? Youthful nominees add intellectual vitality and generational diversity to the bench. The past seven justices were 48, 53, 49, 50, 54, 55 and 50 when nominated.
The president’s commission noted that “the United States is the only major constitutional democracy in the world that has neither a retirement age nor a fixed term of years for its high court justices.” That is not a drawback. Judges subject to bribery and intimidation in foreign countries have often come to think of the Supreme Court as the ideal of judicial independence.
Neither the court nor its members are above rigorous scrutiny and criticism. Yet when we inch this institution toward ordinariness, law itself loses something of its stature. It is true the court has made its share of tragic mistakes. Balancing the shameful chapters of
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