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Like all federal judges, #RBG has a lifetime appointment and can't be compelled to retire. But she's 85. She's had three occurrences of cancer. Should she really be clinging to a seat on the most powerful court in the land? We badly need an amendment to limit SCOTUS terms.
The problem of life tenure on the Supreme Court has been growing more and more apparent.
In July 2005, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 80, issued a statement denying "rumors of my imminent retirement." Two months later, he was dead of thyroid cancer.
In July 2005, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 80, issued a statement denying "rumors of my imminent retirement." Two months later, he was dead of thyroid cancer.
As life expectancy has grown, and as the SCOTUS has become ever more powerful, justices are staying in office much longer than they used to. Charles Evans Hughes, who was chief justice from 1930 to 1941, found it "extraordinary how reluctant aged judges are to retire."
It's now almost routine for justices to cling to power long past their prime. Some, like Rehnquist, become physically debilitated. Others decline mentally. "Mental decrepitude among aging justices is a persistently recurring problem," wrote the historian David J. Garrow.
A stroke left Justice Hugo Black increasingly confused & unable to focus, yet he stayed on the bench until just days before his death. William O. Douglas, also ravaged by a stroke, began dozing during oral arguments and slipping into near-incoherence.
Toward the end, Thurgood Marshall relied on law clerks to do most of his work, while he spent hours watching TV. Often he seemed hopelessly befuddled—as during one oral argument when his clueless questions made clear that he didn't know which side was represented by which lawyer.
The Constitution's framers thought life tenure necessary to guard judicial independence. But they didn't foresee how immensely powerful the Supreme Court would become. Nor could they have predicted that lifespans would lengthen so dramatically over the next two centuries.
Had the Founders known that Supreme Court justices would get so entrenched, hunkering down on the bench for two or three decades, often into advanced old age with all its debilities, it seems unlikely that life terms would have struck them as such a good idea.
No other major democracy grants limitless terms to its supreme court judges; neither do 49 of the 50 states. Most Americans favor an end to lifetime tenure, and numerous scholars have proposed a sound reform: limiting justices to 18 years, with terms staggered two years apart.
Age sometimes brings wisdom; more often it brings incapacity. Americans would be aghast at an airline that allowed 80-year-olds to pilot its jets, or a hospital whose surgeons were weak & befuddled. Shouldn't we be at least as worried about superannuated Supreme Court justices?
