"The Supreme Court’s attacks on voting rights are about rigging elections for Republicans," said Rep. Greg Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Six years is too short a term. I think you want a longer term length, because you want change to happen, just not all at once. The real problem with the SCOTUS is that it’s all up to chance when a spot opens up, and since appointments are currently lifetime appointments if you get a judge on the court who is in their 40’s they could serve 40+ years. Republicans were able to engineer a Majority on the Court, in spite of only holding the Presidency for six years since 2008.
If we had term limits, though, then SCOTUS seats would come up for appointment regularly. The impact of filling one sudden vacancy isnt as great if each President was guaranteed to be able to nominate a few every term.
If the Court stays at 9, I would be in favor of 18 year terms. Or, we could increase to 13, and make the terms 13 years. Both scenarios with strict one-term limits. This makes it so a one-term President can’t nominate enough judges to totally remake a court, and if would take about a decade for the Court to really turn over to the point that it might make different rulings.
The problem with 18- and 13-year terms is that a bad justice would remain a long time. In my proposal, a justice can continue serving beyond 6 years if presidents keep selecting him and the Senate continues to confirm him.
Because we’ve never had a case where the most-unpopular President in history was able to rush judicial nominees through the Senate and stack the Court with political hacks who have been credibly accused of sexual assault and drunkenness. The Senate has totally saved us from that.
If we had 18-year terms, we’d have 4 Obama appointees, 2 Biden, and 3 Trump right now. So it would still be 6-3, but the other direction, and it would represent the medium-long term political viewpoint of the American people, not the newest short-term reactionary position that a 6-year term would provide.
18-year terms is a good idea. I just feel uneasy about a bad justice serving that long. Mathematicians should be given the problem of coming up with the smallest number that would prevent a single President from appointing a majority. They would be allowed to change the number of justices.
Bad justices serve for life now. Bad Presidents can stack the Court with bad justices with terms shorter than 18 years.
And the terms aren’t based on the number of justices, but how long a President serves. A President can usually serve up to 8 years. No matter how many justices you have, having shorter terms would allow a President to stack the court. If you have 100 justices with 16 year terms, an 8-year President would get to change 50 of them. At 18-year terms, they could only nominate 4. And more importantly, they’d automatically get to nominate 4. So you can’t have this bullshit situation where we’ve the majority of the electorate vote for a Republican President twice in the last 34 years, but somehow have 2/3 of the justices appointed by Republicans.
Six years is too short a term. I think you want a longer term length, because you want change to happen, just not all at once. The real problem with the SCOTUS is that it’s all up to chance when a spot opens up, and since appointments are currently lifetime appointments if you get a judge on the court who is in their 40’s they could serve 40+ years. Republicans were able to engineer a Majority on the Court, in spite of only holding the Presidency for six years since 2008.
If we had term limits, though, then SCOTUS seats would come up for appointment regularly. The impact of filling one sudden vacancy isnt as great if each President was guaranteed to be able to nominate a few every term.
If the Court stays at 9, I would be in favor of 18 year terms. Or, we could increase to 13, and make the terms 13 years. Both scenarios with strict one-term limits. This makes it so a one-term President can’t nominate enough judges to totally remake a court, and if would take about a decade for the Court to really turn over to the point that it might make different rulings.
The problem with 18- and 13-year terms is that a bad justice would remain a long time. In my proposal, a justice can continue serving beyond 6 years if presidents keep selecting him and the Senate continues to confirm him.
With 6-year terms an unpopular President could appoint a majority in the period of their first term, then cancel elections with their backing.
That scenario would involve Congress and his nominated justices going along. Longer term limits would mean a bad justice staying for a long time.
Because we’ve never had a case where the most-unpopular President in history was able to rush judicial nominees through the Senate and stack the Court with political hacks who have been credibly accused of sexual assault and drunkenness. The Senate has totally saved us from that.
If we had 18-year terms, we’d have 4 Obama appointees, 2 Biden, and 3 Trump right now. So it would still be 6-3, but the other direction, and it would represent the medium-long term political viewpoint of the American people, not the newest short-term reactionary position that a 6-year term would provide.
18-year terms is a good idea. I just feel uneasy about a bad justice serving that long. Mathematicians should be given the problem of coming up with the smallest number that would prevent a single President from appointing a majority. They would be allowed to change the number of justices.
Bad justices serve for life now. Bad Presidents can stack the Court with bad justices with terms shorter than 18 years.
And the terms aren’t based on the number of justices, but how long a President serves. A President can usually serve up to 8 years. No matter how many justices you have, having shorter terms would allow a President to stack the court. If you have 100 justices with 16 year terms, an 8-year President would get to change 50 of them. At 18-year terms, they could only nominate 4. And more importantly, they’d automatically get to nominate 4. So you can’t have this bullshit situation where we’ve the majority of the electorate vote for a Republican President twice in the last 34 years, but somehow have 2/3 of the justices appointed by Republicans.
Ah, and as we’ve all seen that could never happen… 🙄