Elie Mystal, the justice correspondent for The Nation, writes about ideas for reforming the Supreme Court and highlights our plan to end life tenure for the justices, calling it “perhaps the clearest term-limit proposal” out there.
Mystal points out in the piece that there’s nothing preventing Congress from passing a law that would create the office of “senior justice,” to which future justices would move after a term of 18 years. That would ensure that “terms would be staggered [and] no one president would get to name a disproportionate number of justices. When their terms are over, the justices would take senior status at full salary, avoiding the problem of lifetime tenure.” He adds:
“In recent years, the logic of this approach has become more popular. Polls have shown that a majority of Democrats and Republicans support term limits for justices. Fix the Court’s plan was recently endorsed in an open letter signed by 63 legal scholars from across the ideological spectrum. Conservative columnist John Fund has written positively about the proposal in National Review, of all places. […]
“Even one current Supreme Court justice, Stephen Breyer, has applauded the idea.”
And we applaud Elie for bringing attention to our proposal.