...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.

The problem with a 10 year employment is the expectation of getting paid for performance at the end of that term.

What do you mean by this?

That completely eliminates the judiciary branch as an effective check against the other two.

It's unfortunate but having a stalemate is the best course to eliminate rash changes to government when there is a lot of divisiveness.

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doesn't get to completely stack the court, but each has a fair impact on it, and we aren't stuck with judges with outdated ideologies forever (unless people vote for it).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 proposal more often floated around is an 18-year term limit (see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=701121 ), which would give each president 2 appointments.

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.

would it even matter when presidents are now billionaires in their own right?

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.

> What we absolutely need to avoid is having justices have to care about reelection

It's an appointment, so they would only have to convince the president. Or you can prevent reappointment at all.

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.)

Would be psyched to live in a world where Bush II got to appoint the entire Supreme Court after 9/11.

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.

Section 3 of Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution establishes this, and it was well considered and debated by our founders.