Is it time for ‘more experienced’ judges on the Supreme Court?

By Jason Wright, Editor

Filed Under General, Outside the Track on May 12 

I stumbled across this fascinating piece on the SCOTUS. Richard Primus at TNR makes the case that we need to amend the Constitution to remove the lifetime tenure of Supreme Court justices.

Here’s a snippet, but I highly recommend clicking here to read the rest.

The best solution is to amend the Constitution and replace life tenure with a single, nonrenewable term of 15 or 20 years. Retired justices would receive their full salaries as pensions (just as they do now), and they would be forever barred from other paid work and from holding other offices. Such a system would make justices just as independent as life tenure does, if not more so. The restrictions might seem heavy-handed, but they are unlikely to dry up the supply of candidates for the job of Supreme Court justice. And under such a system, presidents would be more able to choose the strongest candidates. If a president thought that a particular 50-year-old or even a 45-year-old were the best person for the job, so be it. But there would be no reason to prefer a 45-year-old to a 50-year-old, nor a 50-year-old to a 55-year-old. Within a range of about a dozen years, age would be irrelevant.

Anyone agree?

Comments

6 Comments

  1. Brian H on 12.05.2009 at 20:00 (Reply)

    I disagree.

    First. Since the Bill of Rights was added we have only amended the Constitution 17 times in our nation’s history and I doubt this issue could ever achieve the support needed to bring about 2/3 of the House and Senate and 3/4 of the states. Implausible, I believe.

    Two.
    “But the Supreme Court of a constitutional democracy should also share mainstream public values in the long term. In our system, the primary mechanism for achieving that goal is presidential selection of justices. If it works properly, presidential selection enables different political coalitions to shape the court in the same rough proportion as they are able to persuade the public of the wisdom of their worldviews over a series of electoral cycles.”.

    The role of the court is not to reflect or “share mainstream public values”, that is what the legislative branch is for. The role of the court is to reflect the Constitutionality of law. The Dred Scott vs. Sanford decision reflected “mainstream public values” but it was extremely BAD law.

    What we have here is a guy who seems to be upset at the fact that Republicans appointed younger Justices to the court.

    1. kristen on 12.05.2009 at 21:42 (Reply)

      “What we have here is a guy who seems to be upset at the fact that Republicans appointed younger Justices to the court.”

      Agreed. Brian makes good points.

      This seems so trivial when we have bigger ‘issues’ on our plate. If we want to talk about making amends to the Constitution, let’s talk about putting term limits on Congressmen. (Yeah, that’ll happen….)

  2. Jason Wright, Editor on 13.05.2009 at 08:20 (Reply)

    Good points, Brian. Agreed.

  3. East of Eden on 13.05.2009 at 08:37 (Reply)

    The thought of amending the Constitution right now scares the beejeebies out of me. Mostly because I don’t feel that people really understand the founding principles of the nation and of the document itself — think prohibition, that was a nightmare and should have never been a Constitutional issue, there are issues out that that people would try to make into amendments if we started down this road. I also don’t see the Supreme Court as being “broken” say like the Electoral College is percieved to be broken. I agree with Brian’s point, this guy is ticked that a Rep selected younger, conservative leaning guys to the court and they will be there for a loooong time.

    The other thing is that I see a 15-20 year term turning into a very political fiasco. If it’s known that a vacancy is coming up and you have a person who wants to be a Supreme, or there are people who want this or that person to be on the court to influence the decisions etc, it just becomes part of the already insane games that are played by the power brokers of this country. The SC, at least IMO, is the last place of marginal sanity in Washington. It’s not broken, so let’s not “fix’ it.

  4. David Kaiser, Editor on 13.05.2009 at 12:11 (Reply)

    On paper, the idea has some merit, but I agree with Brian that it is very, very unlikely to happen.

    1. Brian H on 13.05.2009 at 19:21 (Reply)

      I am also always a bit skeptical when people start talking about amending the Constitution, for any reason.

Leave a comment