Martin Dyckman: We should limit terms of U.S. Supreme Court justices to 18 years

Among the flock of on-line petitions I declined to sign last week was one calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Much as I and others might wish them gone and forgotten, impeachment is a terrible idea.

The merits aside, it would be a fool’s errand to try to sell it to the present House of Representatives. Time is precious, and there are better uses for it.

The far more serious objection isn’t about the impracticality.

Not even the colossal damage those five have done could be worse for the country than to begin purging justices because of their decisions.

The notion is no sounder now that liberals are aggrieved than when conservatives wanted to impeach Earl Warren for school desegregation and fair apportionment.

We might as well abolish the judiciary and let the Congress be the court of last resort.

Alexander Hamilton warned against that.

“The members of the legislature,” he wrote in The Federalist, “will rarely be chosen with a view to those qualifications which fit men for the station of judges.”

Impeachment is appropriate only for crimes or gross violation of judicial ethics.

The precedent of not removing justices over their opinions was set in 1805 when the Senate, despite having come under Republican control, refused to convict Justice Samuel Chase, a highly partisan Federalist.

The Constitution provides two responsible remedies for the court’s wrongful decisions.

Some can be overturned by new laws. The Hobby Lobby decision misapplied a statute, not the Constitution. We should elect a Congress willing to repair that law and the Voting Rights Act that Roberts cynically eviscerated.

For the court’s distortions of the Constitution, such as Citizens United and corporate personhood, the available remedy is to amend the Constitution.

That’s difficult, yes, but not impossible. It begins with voters who can see through the smokescreens financed by Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers.

The litmus test for every congressional candidate this year should be this: Do you support a constitutional amendment to allow reasonable regulation of campaign contributions and spending?

Such an amendment is pending in the Senate; Majority Leader Harry Reid has promised it will be put to a vote.

The betrayal of America to rich contributors did not begin with the Roberts court, by the way. It dates to 1976, when the Warren Burger court trashed campaign-spending limits.

Speaking of constitutional amendments, it’s time to seriously consider one that would limit justices, and perhaps all federal judges, to nonrenewable terms of 18 years.

When the founders established tenure for life, it was to protect the independence of the judiciary. They didn’t want judges deciding cases by the fear of someone not reappointing them.

Age isn’t the issue; John Paul Stevens was still an outstanding justice when he retired at 90. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s wisdom is unabated at 81.

The problem is this: The court is already too politicized. With so much at stake in each new appointment, presidents have been looking for nominees young enough to stay forever. The impulse of the opposition party is to resist by any means.

An 18-year term limit would relieve considerable pressure. Senators who mistrust a nominee’s sincerity — remember Roberts and Alito promising to respect precedent? –would have the comfort of knowing that he or she would not serve forever.

Importantly, at least two vacancies would occur during each president’s term.

Writing in the New York Times two years ago, Supreme Court expert Linda Greenhouse said she found herself attracted to what she once had thought was a “bad, if not crazy” idea.

“Since Supreme Court vacancies occur so randomly (Carter with none, Nixon with four), each vacancy is a cataclysmic event for which the president’s and Senate’s business basically comes to a standstill,” she explained.

So 18-year terms “might lower the temperature surrounding each vacancy.” People would vote for president “knowing for sure, rather than in the abstract, that they were also voting in effect for two Supreme Court justices.”

There, she got to the heart of it. Justices appointed by Republican presidents have been in the majority since 1970, despite three Democrats having been president since then.

And now, the court’s most controversial 5 to 4 opinions consistently reflect the politics of the appointing presidents.

This wasn’t the case before. We need to put a stop to it.

Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Waynesville, North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.