The Supreme Court Tenure Establishment and Retirement Modernization Act (Term), would establish 18-year terms for supreme court justices and establish a process for the president to appoint a new justice every two years. After an 18-year term, justices would be retired from active judicial service.

If the bill were to take effect, the nine justices now on the court would essentially be forced into senior status in order of reverse seniority, as jurists were appointed under the new mechanism.

Supreme court justices are currently appointed for life. The US stands alone as the only advanced democracy that does not have either a fixed term or a mandatory retirement age for judges on its highest court.

“Regularizing appointments every two years will ensure a supreme court that is more representative of the nation, reflecting the choices of recently elected presidents and senators,” Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat who introduced the bill, said in a statement.

“Term limits for supreme court justices are an essential tool to restoring a constitutional balance to the three branches of the federal government.”

“If two seats on the supreme court are guaranteed to open every four years, the court might become even more of an issue in electoral politics than it currently is,” the panel wrote.

“Presidential candidates might have even greater incentives to make promises about who they will appoint, and presidential elections might increasingly appear to the public to also be elections of specific identified persons – now candidates – to the supreme court.”

Confidence in the supreme court is at a record low. Just 25% of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the court, according to a June Gallup poll.

Elena Kagan, appointed to the court by Barack Obama, said last week that if the court “loses all connection with the public and with public sentiment, that’s a dangerous thing for a democracy”.

Courtesy the Guardian