TERM LIMITS AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION. Brad Plumer reads Tom Goldstein's astute analysis of pending changes to the court and proposes term limits: "The fact that, say, Mitt Romney could nudge out Hillary Clinton by a percentage point or two and then bring about a constitutional revolution seems fairly absurd, and a decent argument in favor of term limits for Justices, no?" One thing to add is that the revolution on the Court hasn't tracked changes in the electorate with nearly the precision that is often assumed. Since Roe was decided, there have been eight presidential elections and Democrats and Republicans have each won the popular vote four times. And at the Congressional level, Democrats have emerged with control of the House after eleven of those elections, Republicans in just six, while the Senate has been evenly split with each party winning control eight elections (counting 2000 as a tie because of Jeffords.) That doesn't sound like the basis for a massive conservative shift at the Supreme Court. Because of the randomness of the appointment process and some anachronistic anti-democratic features of the Constitution, however, Republicans have picked most of the justices. If we can't get rid of most of the latter, we can at least change the former to make the Supreme Court track political changes a little more closely.
Of course, as the cross-ideological support for term limits suggests, in the long run Supreme Court term limits won't systematically benefit either party. They're desirable because they make sense; most modern constitutional courts have some form of non-renewable fixed term because it's a better system. Appointments should be divided evenly between Presidents rather than distrusted randomly, and we shouldn't create incentives to appoint younger justices purely for political advantage.
--Scott Lemieux
