The commission President Joe Biden created to study expanding the Supreme Court could give Democrats the chance to realize Democrats’ goals of limiting the tenure of U.S. Supreme Court justices, The Daily Caller reported.
Biden on April 9 signed an executive order creating the presidential commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, to examine topics like “the genesis of the reform debate; the Court’s role in the Constitutional system; the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court; the membership and size of the Court; and the Court’s case selection, rules, and practices.”
House Democrats in October of 2020 introduced a bill supporting limiting a justice’s term to 18 years in a bid to reduce partisan warring over vacancies and preserve the court’s legitimacy.
The bill, which did not pass, would have allowed every president to nominate two justices per 4-year term.
Those justices who do not reach their term limit would be designated as “senior” justices and rotated to lower courts.
The length of the current court tenure has nearly doubled in the past 50 years, according to an analysis by the left-leaning advocacy group, Fix the Court, according to the Daily Caller.
“Three decades is too long a time for anyone in a democracy to have as much power as a Supreme Court justice has,” said Gabe Roth, the group’s executive director.
He also told the Daily Caller rotating justices would help de-politicize the confirmation battle process.
“Justices would no longer game their retirements and hold on to their seats past their primes and until a like-minded president sits in the Oval Office,” Roth said.
“Senior status for lower court judges was created by Congress, so Congress could create a kind of senior status for future high court justices,” he added.
Source: Newmax
