A ten year term ought to do the trick, though. And would allow the passage of time to undo any stacking of the court that a particular president wants to engage in.
...until you get presidential candidates campaigning on the promise that they'll fill SCOTUS seats with the candidates of their alignment. It's practically an election by proxy.
But we have that now. The idea of setting a term limit for Supreme Court justices is that it would minimize the effect of politicized appointments. Assuming the party that gets to make the appointments shifts over time, the makeup of the court is likely to be more balanced overall.
6 year staggered appointments. So 3 justices terms are up every 2 years. Means one president doesn't get to completely stack the court, but each has a fair impact on it, and we aren't stuck with judges with outdated ideologies forever (unless people vote for it).
The big difficult, however, is how to make sure that a hostile senate wouldn't just block all nominations (which is the new norm). Some people like Calabresi have suggested that the president and everyone in the senate would be denied all compensation (IIRC even from private parties) until the seat is filled. I don't think that's a workable idea though.
The simple way to stop the Senate from just blocking everything (which it does by not scheduling a vote, to avoid accountability of individual senators to voting down qualified candidates) is to reshape their confirmation power to a power to actively reject.
6 years is awfully short for this sort of thing. What we absolutely need to avoid is having justices have to care about reelection, which means we need to say justices can only ever serve one term, which means we need longer terms.
Ok "reelection" is the wrong term, but if anything this is worse, because if judges can have multiple terms then it means they're beholden to the current president when their term ends and therefore will be heavily swayed by party politics. This is why judgeships are normally lifetime roles, though the important part of "lifetime role" is "only one term" and not "never ends".
> 6 year staggered appointments. So 3 justices terms are up every 2 years. Means one president doesn't get to completely stack the court
Most presidents are reelected to two terms, and so if judicial terms were offset from Presidential terms by a year, they'd have:
At 0 years, 0 justices they appointed.
At 1 year, 3 justices.
At 3 years, 6 justices.
At 5-8 years (and up until 1 year into the next term), all 9 justices.
So most President get to completely stack the court, the effects just don't last as long—the judiciary becomes another weathervane political branch of government, because the two of those was too few.
(And I don't even want to consider the consequences of all those short time justices looking to their post-Court career while sitting on the bench.)
Citizen's United was decided on Jan 21, 2010. At this point the court would have still been dominated by Bush II appointees not Obama ones. Always hard to say for sure, but it probably goes the same way under this proposal.
> 6 year staggered appointments. So 3 justices terms are up every 2 years. Means one president doesn't get to completely stack the court, but each has a fair impact on it, and we aren't stuck with judges with outdated ideologies forever (unless people vote for it).
That's how the Senate used to work, with state legislatures "electing" the senators.
That was replaced a hundred years ago with direct election of senators.
