Again With The Judicial Term Limits

This seems like a good time to note that Matt is completely right about judicial term limits. I’ve been through this before, so rather than elaborating again I’ll just emphasize that since justices are already perfectly free to resign and get rewarded by powerful interests they’ve favored in past rulings that the idea that non-renewable fixed terms will undermine judicial independence are especially implausible.

One additional thing to note is that the hypothetical that Matt puts forward below isn’t actually purely hypothetical:

What’s more, we might plausibly see in the near future the situation in which an elderly justice begins to suffer from very serious medical problems but refuses to step down because he or she finds the incumbent president ideologically uncongenial.

This basically describes what happened with William Douglas, who stayed on for too long after a serious stroke partly in a futile attempt to deny Gerald Ford — who had led an attempt to impeach Douglas in Congress — the ability to appoint his replacement. (His brethren actually created an informal rule that they would only issue rulings if Douglas’s vote didn’t affect the outcome.) And while it had nothing to do with who would appoint his replacement — indeed, a couple hundred thousand votes in Ohio and it could have handed his seat to a Democratic appointment — I think it’s very likely that William Rehnquist also stayed on beyond his ability to do his job well. It’s unlikely that this will be the last example…