Appointment to the SC could still come with a life time salary. Give them the option after their term is up if they want to pursue academic style judicial writing or taking on pro-bono cases. But with the understanding that they don't take cases or other jobs for profit. We could even continue to fund a number of clerks for them. Or they could just take their money and retire.
Lol, you are going to restrict what a human being is allowed to do for the rest of their life? That's beyond even authoritarianism. Are you going to lock them out of family companies? Of taking on projects about which they are passionate? Of doing something productive with the rest of their lives? Do you really think people that become Justices are just to going accept a permanent dead end?
But that's the kind of off the cuff dismissive answer that proves you haven't actually thought the issue through (which is exactly what I identified as the problem). You picked it as a solution because it "sounds" reasonable not because its tied logically to problems you've actually identified and are seeking to sovle.
The reality is that term limits will create a massive incentive to corruption and do nothing to curtail politically abusive decision making.
Why? The SC is unique, the other judicial appointments could still be lifetime. People sometimes leave lower courts for other jobs already.
Lol, this is the worst idea ever. Permanent judicial bureaucracy at a level below the SC only loosely controlled by the limited number of cases the SC can hear. The 9th Circuit has been overruled 5 times on the same issue this year alone, you'd enshrine a distributed abuse of power so long as the figure heads appear to be changed. Circuit court judges with life tenor would be dictators and the politically motivated SC would have zero control over them.
The court is already used politically.
It is, but I'm not sure you really understand when it its. Can you point to the political decisions? Seriously, can you do it, can you walk through the decision itself and demonstrate what was political and wasn't? We have had decades of progressive decisions implementing policies that had no electoral mandate, we've had dozens of material decisions that bent the Constitution into a pretzel, but I suspect your beef is with the judgement and not the analysis, which means you don't even know what the political decisions are. So I'm honestly curious - can you, without jumping onto a progressive publication made to support your arguments identify the problematic judgements and what was political about the reasoning?
My honest suspicion is that you can't.
What I'm proposing is that we just quit having people wield that level of power for 3 decades.
I see, so unelected dictators wielding an unConstitutional authority should be accepted so long as its for 2 decades (18 years) rather than 3? Why not address that they're wielding too much power?
And I actually think the legislature should claw back power from the executive and courts. I thought that under Obama, Trump, and still think that under Biden. But the legislature can't or won't claw that power back while the Senate stands in permanent deadlock. If the filibuster dies, there will be Republican policies in the future that I will strongly disagree with. But an ineffective legislature that doesn't address issues of the nation (from a conservative, progressive, or moderate viewpoint) just lets more and more power seep into the executive and courts.
If you truly want this you should be advocating to tear down the administrative state. Congress can only avoid its duty to pass laws because they've delegated to those agencies the ability to pass laws to the extent that they have. Those agencies pass orders of magnitude more laws than Congress ever did and they do it without any elected officials interfering no matter how politically motivated those rules are, without any real oversight, and then they also enforce, judge and punish the victims of those laws, increasingly without any oversight by elected executives or even the judicial branch. If our problem is really a lack of legislation you'd be hard pressed to honestly explain how progressive staffs pushing huge volumes of regulations hasn't solved that problem.
I'm not going to respond to the rest of your post because for the most part you just misrepresented my actual position and implied I'm just a useful idiot for not buying into your conservative viewpoint that democrats are the root of all evil and out to dominate the country by any means necessary.
Whether someone is a useful idiot is determined by whether they seek to find out the truth or whether they just repeat back illogical propaganda.
Ask yourself why you locked on to the "reasonable" sounding concept of term limits rather than the openly political power grab of adding more Justices. There's nothing about the 18 year limit that actually addresses the concerns that are raised, have you seen some sort of study that shows Justices at year 20 are more likely to make political judgements than Justices at year 12? Of course not, because the actual studies show that political Justices make political decisions from day one and over time they trend towards philosophies that have more legal principal in them (even if they're still politically motivated). Whether that's because their "party" leaves them behind, or whether its because spending all that time having to think and argue legal arcana retrains their brains to think in that manner is immaterial.
I mean look at Ginsburg. Very much on the left of the spectrum, yet also very committed to civil liberties. The modern progressives view civil liberties as a hinderence when attacking "bad" people. I mean we just saw in the last cop involved shooting a city manager firing for saying the officer deserved due process. Due process is a fundamental guaranty to EVERY American, it's in the US Constitution and virtually every State Constitution, its the back bone of everything most of us believe about our rights in criminal law. Was she a worse Justice in your view because she'd been there "too long" and would back due process even when banana justice demands a guilty verdict practically without consideration? Was it really a problem to you that her positions had become more solidly rooted in principals?
The strongest legal philosophies on the right are serious commitments to the rule of law and to the legislative branch (and even administrative agencies) being responsible for making those laws. Standing in opposition to that is literally anti-democratic, it's literally supporting the idea that it's better for a dictator to impose their own position on what the law should be over top of the decision of Congress. Yet that's exactly what you're calling for.
Your arguments on why we need to change the SC are not logical, they are rationalizations. You don't like the current make up of the SC, ergo you will accept any position or any change that alters that make up in favor of Justices you think will serve your political goals. Seriously, the entire reason for court packing is to try an put in place a SC that will allow the Constitution to be violated, that's what you're asking for. It's not wonder though that the elected Democrats are willing to smash any norm, violate any principal and engage in naked Real Politik to implement it, they already know that the Constitution doesn't support their plans, ergo it's in the way of their ambition.
