Slight nitpick: each Presidential term.
Obviously a two-term POTUS will get 4 and someone serving a partial term could get 1 or 0.
And there will still be vacancies as justices can still die or retire or be impeached and removed from office during their 18 year term.
But it would result in less variation in the number of SCOTUS appointments in each POTUS term.
Need bigger chambers. Nothing money cant fix.
As long as there is better representation for larger states, good
Lots of merit to that, but very complicated implementation rules to create. I assume this would require a constitutional amendment. If it were done as a constitutional amendment, then presumably it would be constitutional to apply the limits to the current judges, but if they got to decide whether limits applied to them, they might decide not.
Examples of issues:
Assuming the change was to be effective in 2030 (purely as an example), we would have terms starting 2031, 2033, 2035… with 9 sitting justices, Probably we assign the sitting justices to the terms starting 2049, 2051,… [mistaken comment about increasing court size edited away]
If a justice dies or resigns, does that give he president then the right to choose 3 justices? Presumably.
What about Chief Justice? Simple enough if the president wants a non-justice as the new Chief Justice, but suppose he wants an existing justice with 4 years left to be the new Chief Justice? Does that person become Chief Justice for 4 years (and the president also appoints a new associate justice to an 18 year term at the same time)?
Yes, there are details. Possible answers:
Given that this is a constitutional amendment, current justices cannot rule it unconstitutional. The justice who has been serving the longest is assigned the term which ends the soonest, etc. If this results in a justice having less than 18 years, that person gets to serve the additional years and the replacement is “short” term as below.
The court size does not increase, they leave according to their new terms.
Yes, vacancies are filled by the regular nomination/confirmation process for the remainder of the term. That short term justice has no possibility of becoming a regular term justice. I’m sure there are experienced appeals court justices who would love to be SC justices for a few years, and they would probably do a good job.
If a chief justice dies before the end of his/her term, the president could name either a sitting justice as chief justice, or the new short-term justice. Either war, that person still leaves on schedule and we have an opening for a new chief justice.
I would welcome the practice of the longest-tenured SCOTUS justice stepping down / being term-limited every two years, preferably in odd-numbered years when the Senate would be less likely to play political games in approving replacements.
I also think, considering their other duties, something could be said for having one Justice per appellate circuit (11-13, depending on whether the DC and Federal circuits need their own SCOTUS Justice oversight).
No. I think you’d have to grandfather the current justices if you wanted it to actually happen.
You assign the current justices to terms randomly, alphabetically, in the order they were appointed, something. But they are under no obligation to step down when their term is up. Then whenever their seat does become vacant the POTUS appoints someone to the partial term that remains. It’ll take 30 years or so before this is phased in and actually working as intended.
So say this passes next year and Clarence Thomas (senior member of the court) is assigned to the term that ends in 2025. He doesn’t have to resign in 2025 because he’s grandfathered. He chooses to retire in 2028. Now the POTUS appoints someone to fill the 15-year partial term (the full term began in 2025) and runs until 2043.
If Thomas instead decides to resign in 2024 then maybe you’ve got a 6-month partial term. I’d maybe allow (but not require) that justice to be reappointed in 2025. Maybe if they serve a partial term of under two years. No especially strong feelings on where to draw that line.
I’m ambivalent on this. I suspect that Bush/Roberts started a new tradition of the Chief Justice not being one of the existing justices. It’s just simply too much hassle to go through two confirmations when you only need to go through one, and the Chief Justice doesn’t really have that much extra power. I guess I’d say that if the POTUS was glutton for punishment he could appoint a sitting SCJOTUS to the Chief Justice spot and appoint someone else to the partial Associate Justice term. I doubt many POTUS’s would make that call though.
What is worse than a two-party system of government? A one-party system of government.
What a strange, easily disproven, claim to make.
Five of the 17 chief justices—John Rutledge, Edward Douglass White, Charles Evans Hughes, Harlan Fiske Stone, and William Rehnquist—served as associate justice prior to becoming chief justice.
And it looks like only 3 of those 5 were AJs at the time of becoming CJ, with the other two having other jobs in between.
I don’t think so. To me, this would take a constitutional amendment. I have an earlier post with the rule I would follow.
Oh it definitely would. But I still think you’d grandfather those affected. As an example (that could well serve as precedent) Truman was explicitly grandfathered on term limits for POTUS, although he chose to not run for re-election at the point where he would have been term-limited had the amendment applied to him.
I think the sitting justices would find some reason why they needed to be grandfathered and it’s not worth the fight, quite frankly. What’s done is done.
Huh, I was thinking it was more common than it is to promote an Associate Justice. A new Chief Justice only happens a handful of times in one lifetime, so I hadn’t researched the old guys… I just had a vague sense when Roberts was nominated for Chief Justice that it was unusual. But maybe the unusual part was just having two vacancies at once.
Regardless of how common it was or wasn’t in the past, with how political the confirmations are these days, I foresee precisely 0 Associate Justices getting promoted to Chief Justice in the foreseeable future as it’s just not worth the headache of an extra confirmation hearing IMO. To either Democrats or Republicans.
That was my actual point… that AJs aren’t going to be promoted to CJ going forward so the Constitutional treatment for such a scenario is of extremely low importance.
If we are talking what’s politically feasible today, none of this is. There is nothing on the horizon that suggests 3/4 of state legislatures agreeing to SC term limits.
I’m talking about what I’d like to see, and what I think would be “reasonable” for sitting justices. The table below is an example of how this would work if the amendment magically were ratified this year.
And, again, the sitting justices may have opinions, but their opinions have no more legal weight then mine. Politically, their obvious self interest would shade anything they said publicly.
Not really, since they are the arbiters and you are not (assuming that you are not actually one of the 9 justices masquerading as an actuary, that is. I know, HFBB.)
They get to interpret the Constitutional Amendment and what it means. If 5 or more of them agree that “this DOES apply to the sitting justices” actually means “this does NOT apply to the sitting justices” then POOF! It doesn’t apply to them. I’d rather sidestep the rigamarole and exempt them.
Plus I genuinely believe that grandfathering them is legitimately the correct thing to do anyway. I don’t like changing the rules of the game on people already playing.
Yeah you can grandfather sitting justices, that would probably be fine and workable. That said, justices have lifetime tenure, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have to have life time tenure on the SC. The bill could say something like “at the end of the SC term, the Justice will have the choice of retirement with full benefits or moving to an appellate court seat with the same pay and benefits as SC justice” or something like that.
But either way that just seems to be one detail in much needed court reform.
I’m assuming the amendment’s language on sitting justices would be clear.
Agree, and afaik SCOTUS is not really involved in the amendment process.
Did you read my post? It can be as clear as day and they can still interpret it however they want.
Yep, I read your post before I replied. I think even the SC has limits on how far they will go.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Do you mean when someone sues to nullify the amendment after it is ratified? SCOTUS wouldn’t have any say in the matter until then.