Prof. Kermit Roosevelt analyzes what a world with Supreme Court term limits would look like.
At Bloomberg Law, Kermit Roosevelt, David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice, argues that adding justices to the Supreme Court and limiting terms is the way to start undoing partisanship.
Roosevelt is a constitutional law scholar who has been part of several groups designing term limits, from President Biden’s Supreme Court Commission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Working Group.
“The main impact of term limits is to regularize the appointment process by allowing each president to appoint two justices per four-year presidential term,” writes Roosevelt.
From Bloomberg Law:
For the first time ever, a president has endorsed term limits for US Supreme Court justices. Under President Joe Biden’s proposal, each justice would spend 18 years in active service then move on to a different set of duties.
Putting aside the question whether the plan will be enacted, how would a world with term limits look? We can answer this question in two ways: by looking back and looking forward. Each perspective shows us a different side of the issue.
The main impact of term limits is to regularize the appointment process by allowing each president to appoint two justices per four-year presidential term.
Looking back, if the plan had been in place, we would now have two justices appointed by Biden, two by Donald Trump, four by Barack Obama, and one by George W. Bush. Instead of the current 6-3 Republican supermajority, we would have a 6-3 Democratic supermajority.
Would that be an improvement? Democrats certainly think so; Republicans probably do not. But Democrats would have that advantage because a term-limited court would reflect the past 18 years of the presidency: 12 years of Democrats and 6 of Republicans.
There is probably something to be said for tying control of the court to success in national elections. We are now three justices away from where we would have been if each president had an equal impact on the court… .
Roosevelt is the author of The Nation that Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story—an eye-opening reinterpretation of the American story.
He works in a diverse range of fields, focusing on constitutional law and conflict of laws and has published scholarly books and articles in both fields. Roosevelt is also the author of two novels, and, in 2014, he was selected by the American Law Institute as the Reporter for the Third Restatement of Conflict of Laws.