Pirate's Cove

Interestingly, this really isn’t that bad of an idea. There are lots and lots of people on the right and left who think there should be term limits on Supreme Court justices as well as federally appointed judges. I certainly agree with it. But, let’s face it, this is simply the Democrats response to Trump getting another SCOTUS pick, a big stompy foot

Democrats prepare bill limiting U.S. Supreme Court justice terms to 18 years

Democrats in of the House of Representatives will introduce a bill next week to limit the tenure of U.S. Supreme Court justices to 18 years from current lifetime appointments, in a bid to reduce partisan warring over vacancies and preserve the court’s legitimacy.

The new bill, seen by Reuters, would allow every president to nominate two justices per four-year term and comes amid heightened political tensions as Republican President Donald Trump prepares to announce his third pick for the Supreme Court after the death on Sept. 18 of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with just 40 days to go until the Nov. 3 election.

“It would save the country a lot of agony and help lower the temperature over fights for the court that go to the fault lines of cultural issues and is one of the primary things tearing at our social fabric,” said California U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, who plans to introduce the legislation on Tuesday, along with Representatives Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts and Don Beyer of Virginia. (snip)

Term limits for high court justices have for years had support from a number of legal scholars on both the right and the left. Several polls in recent years have also shown large majorities of the American public support term limits.

But, hey, doesn’t this rather require a Constitutional amendment?

Some legal observers, including those who favor term limits, say they must be accomplished through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which has been interpreted as requiring life tenure for federal judges and justices.

The bill seeks to avoid constitutional concerns by exempting current justices from the 18-year rule. Those appointed under term limits would become “senior” upon retirement and rotate to lower courts.

Would this be Constitutional? Good question. It’s not so cut and dry an answer. What it does do is make it so a majority party with a same party president could simply pass a law doing away with the law, ending the limits. What this is all about is patronizing the Democratic base in an attempt to say “look, we’re doing something to counter Trump, all hail us!” And, like so many of the Big Ideas Dems have, such as the Green New Deal, it will languish in committee, with no movement and no discussion, much less getting a vote on the floor.

You can surely place a big bet that they do not want to go the Constitutional amendment route because then people will start talking heavily about needing term limits for Congress, and the elected Aristocracy do not want that. And it would give a good reason to work to get rid of the 17th Amendment, putting the appointment of Senators back in the hands of state General Assemblies, which would mean people would need to pay way more attention to their state governments, and Democrats do not want that to happen, either, especially when citizens would notice the issues with the state bureaucracies.

Place you money on it being introduced Tuesday, maybe even Monday, as a way to take some of the coverage off Trump’s pick, which he’s supposedly going to make Saturday, and then it disappearing into the Hole Of Liberal Ideas.