No Other Western Democracy Allows This

Just as congressional leaders have resisted calls for generational change, so too have justices resisted pressure to step down. Some progressives called for Ginsburg to retire in 2014, when Democrats still controlled the White House and the Senate and had more power to replace her with a like-minded successor. “To me this is a totally nonpartisan problem, but we get these justices who become too full of themselves, want to be public celebrities, and become convinced that, you know, their continuation in office so long as they can breathe is essential,” Garrow said, noting that both the conservative Scalia and the liberal Ginsburg eagerly embraced the fame they achieved toward the end of their lives. “That’s just fundamentally wrong.”

“We’ve seen with Scalia and now Ginsburg how unpredictable sudden deaths then result in intense partisan conflict,” he added.

In a 2000 law-review article, Garrow argued for a mandatory retirement age for the Supreme Court, citing the “mental decrepitude” that had befallen justices including Bill Douglas in the 1970s and Thurgood Marshall two decades later. The closest Congress came to addressing the issue was in 1954, when a large Senate majority approved a constitutional amendment that would have forced all federal judges to retire at 75. Days later, however, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, and the nation’s attention shifted to the fight over desegregation.

Now the debate over reforming the Supreme Court centers not on age but on political power. No one has questioned the mental acuity of any of the current justices, or of Rehnquist, Scalia, and Ginsburg, who recently died in office. (Justice John Paul Stevens served until he was 90 and wrote three books in the nine years between his retirement and his death.) Progressives are pushing to expand the Court if Biden wins the presidency and Democrats recapture the Senate majority, to counteract a likely 6–3 conservative advantage that they would consider at least partly illegitimate. Others, such as the nonpartisan group Fix the Court, are advocating a broader reform to set an 18-year term limit for justices and guarantee that each president will get two appointments in a four-year term.

When I asked Gabe Roth, Fix the Court’s executive director, to weigh term limits against a mandatory retirement age, he favored term limits. The problem with a retirement age, he said, is that presidents would just respond by picking younger nominees to ensure that they can still serve on the Court for a long time, extending their legacy. Instead of justices in their late 40s or 50s, he said, “our Supreme Court justices would be 30 or 35.”

At the state level, 32 of the 50 states have mandatory retirement ages, ranging from 70 to 90, according to the National Center for State Courts. There has been a recent push to change the system by raising the age when judges must retire or by removing the limits altogether, notes Bill Raftery, a senior analyst for the NCSC. For the most part, that effort has failed when put to the ballot. “Voters don’t want to give judges additional active years,” Raftery told me. Then he laughed: “They don’t want to give them to any elected officials.”

Russell Berman is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.