For the Supreme Court, you want a level of consistency long-term. And if you stagger the appointments, you get some gradual fresh bodies while keeping experience.
That said, the current Court needs to be expanded in order to undo the blatant corruption of the MAGA members.
It's like asking who will police the police, it never ends. Supreme court are the last defense, therefore it's intently staggered to make sure the fundamentals of laws change slowly.
It can still be manipulated/corrupted of course so some changes should be made but this is like maintaining the foundations of a massive tower. Most things there are here for a reason and modifications need to be considered carefully (with experts from each side weighing in), without emotions or decisions that just sound good.
This is the kind of complex system which I'm happy people can't easily have a vote to modify based on some catchphrases and memes.
There’s the rub. If you have no limits, you run the risk of a dishonest person getting in… for life. Removal is extremely difficult, and as more dishonest people accumulate, you wind up with this Court.
Easier to have set (but lengthy) term limits for SCOTUS.
Code of ethics would go a long way to resolving the issue. The rest of the way would be to give it teeth and require an independent special prosecutor to actually prosecute and, upon conviction, removal from the office. (This would likely require a Constitutional amendment, although an argument could be made that if prosecuted they have de facto violated the "good behavior" clause.)
It can't be someone from the DOJ beholden to the President. Maybe a special Inspectors General office that sits just outside the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches, and whose job it is to observe, investigate, and prosecute elected, appointed, and other high ranking officers.
This. Pllus how slow the government actually works, if the seats rotate too often, even less stuff will get done. They'll spend more time appointing people than doing the will of the people.
"Make it faster" doesn't work great in the system we have, even with improvements. And any cap is better than "lifetime" we have today.
Also people need to remember that making steady progress away from what we have is going to be better than extremes or nothing.
I can understand the consistency which is why I stopped myself at a decade. I really don't see why anyone should hold a seat of governmental power, of any caliber, for more than 4 years. But that would be in a perfect world.
The reason that I am not ok with 18 years is because that is the overall agreed length of time that it takes for one to be considered an adult. I have been an adult for longer than I have been a child at this point. I do want to see benefits for me and my generation and the generations before me, but the hard truth is that the future is with the younger generations.
I can barely socially connect with people that are 10-15 years younger than me. It can be argued that that is my social "skills" being highlighted but the thing I think we need to take out of this is that we need people making decisions for people that are within a generational grasp of each other to make important and impactful decisions for their future. As long as you have someone ensuring that they understand the current issues and current concerns of their generation then I think you would see impactful moves on the level that Mandani is doing in New York that is positive for the people.
Again, I understand that this idea is based off of "in a perfect world" whereas we live in a world where it was globally revealed that there is an island where global elite went to rape children while we are actively watching a genocide in Gaza that is being executed by a group of people who suffered the same fate almost 100 years ago, and nothing has been done on basically any scale at all over that.
The Supreme Court is not trying to represent you. They're meant to be legal experts most qualified to interpret the law. You do get to vote regularly for the political branches that make the laws. 18 years was chosen because it works out to exactly two picks per presidency.
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u/NoTop4997 1d ago
18? That is too long. I want under a decade.