Just Politics

[janice shell]

If Alito wants reform, let's start with making the term for a Supreme 10 yrs, instead of for life. As in 1/2 a generation in time.

That invites the Rule of Unintended Consequences to have its way. And a generation isn't 20 years; it's 30 years.

If the Court were expanded, it might become more like other courts. The justices might not feel they had to stay on board forever. But if you require them to leave at a specific time, there'd be all sorts of political jockeying in advance of his or her departure.

However, the more justices there are, the greater the natural turnover. Some will still hang on forever, but others will retire. As we've all learned by now, the constitution doesn't prescribe a specific number of justices, and the actual number of them varied in the first hundred years of the country's existence.

Roosevelt didn't succeed in adding more justices to help him in his second term. But times have changed in ways that may change how we feel about increasing the number of justices. The Court has much more work now than it did back in the 1930s. There are more circuit courts now, and most cases that go to the Supremes come from those courts.

In addition, the circuit courts have different numbers of judges: the biggest is the Eleventh Circuit, which has 29; the smallest, the First Circuit, has nine. So perhaps it's time to consider beefing up the Supreme Court.