Story by Will Chappell, Contributing Writer
Last week, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer gave in to political pressure and announced his retirement from the bench. Joe Biden will now nominate a Black woman candidate, and barring extreme hijinks from Senator Manchin or Synema, she will become the first Black woman to sit on our nation’s highest court.
That is all well and good. It’s how the process of appointing members of our highest court is supposed to proceed— there are even rumblings that several Republican Senators may break with recent precedent and vote to approve Biden’s nominee. It’s also a welcome respite when two of the three last openings, including those of Justices Gorsuch and Coney-Barrett, came amid extreme controversy in presidential election years.
But I’d like to discuss a different issue: Justice Breyer is 83 years old, and he was appointed to the court in 1994.
By all accounts, he was a prudent and hard-working justice. But despite his advanced years and illustrious career, Breyer did not want to step down. It took a coordinated, year-long campaign to convince the octogenarian that it was time for him to retire so his successor could be appointed by a president of the same political persuasions.
Every part of that last paragraph is unseemly— a pressure campaign to nudge a sitting justice into retirement; the cold, political calculations driving the entire plot. But also, an octogenarian, who after a quarter-century at the highest level of his profession may well have stayed on the bench until his death.
Despite his protestations to the contrary, the end of Breyer’s Supreme Court tenure shows just how bogged down in the morass of Washington the Supreme Court has become.
Of course, this is nothing new. The Supreme Court’s decisions have always reflected the political sentiment of their day from the retrograde, like the Dred Scott decision in 1856 denying citizenship to those of African descent, to the progressive, like the Obergefell decision in 2015 legalizing same-sex marriage. It’s inevitable that despite our common law justice system’s emphasis on precedent as the supreme arbiter, changing sentiment and individual justice’s biases over time will impact the direction of the nation’s juris prudence.
It is time to move past the antiquated notion of a politically neutral Supreme Court and work instead to normalize and minimize politics’s effects on the judicial branch. The best remedy would be to pass a bill implementing term limits on Supreme Court Justices, like that introduced by Representative Ro Kanna (D-CA) in 2020. The proposed legislation would have limited Supreme Court justices to terms of 18 years, the average historical term served by justices.
Installing a term limit would increase turnover significantly relative to recent years while also guaranteeing each President two appointments per term. This would head off confirmation battles being either postponed or crammed through in an election year, which has contributed to less than half of Americans approving of the job the court is doing. It would also give voters a definite idea of how their votes would affect the balance of power in the court.
It is time to end the macabre tradition of watching the health of Supreme Court Justices like a tight pennant race. It’s time to give the American people a measure of equal representation on a body that is integral to shaping the future of our nation. We need to institute Supreme Court term limits to bring increased equity to the judicial branch of our federal government.
