Quote:
Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Lifetime appointments for S. Ct. justices.
Limit them to 18 years. Stagger the terms so every president gets 2 picks (or should). Avoids incentives to appoint young people who stick around forever; prevents people from hanging on forever; gives presidents and senate a fairly frequent opportunity to have some influence on the court's makeup (not at random intervals either). No concern that they'll kowtow to litigants to ensure a post-judging job, since most will be at retirement age anyway.
Also, while we're amending (and we might not need an amendment to do this), I would create a provision that, whenever a justice is recused, the chief judge from one of the circuits (other than the Fed. Cir. and the one from which the case arises) is selected (perhaps by lot) to sit as an acting justice for that case only.
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I like the first idea; of course, it would require that the constitution also set the size of the court. I believe some states have very lengthy terms like this, but am not sure how it works out.
I think the framers were very wary of setting too much detail about the court in stone. The Supreme Court was, after all, one of the bigger experiments in the new Republic. There are very few models for the Supreme Court, and some of the ideas, like lifetime appointments, were reforms people had been clamoring for over many years.
It might have been useful to have a mandatory "revisit" of the experiment after thirty or forty years, in which case it wouldn't surprise me at all to have seen a change like an 18 year term.
But then, they may well have had little idea of just how reluctant we'd all be to change the document.
I'm not sure the second idea belongs in the Constitution. Perhaps just a clause enabling the Court to develop its own mechanism for dealing with recusals and absences.
