President also says presidential immunity for crimes should be removed and ethics rules for justices should be stricter
Joe Biden has called for a series of reforms to the US Supreme Court, including the introduction of term limits for justices and a constitutional amendment to remove immunity for crimes committed by a president while in office.
In an op-ed published on Monday morning, the president said justices should be limited to a maximum of 18 years’ service on the court rather than the current lifetime appointment, and also said ethics rules should be strengthened to regulate justices’ behavior.
The call for reform comes after the supreme court ruled in early July that former presidents have some degree of immunity from prosecution, a decision that served as a major victory for Donald Trump amid his legal travails.
“This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States,” Biden wrote.
Having life-tenure is not to incentivize people to do it. It’s to make them resistant to outside influence. If you’re going to be out of a job in x years, then it behoves you to make some friends. If your job is guaranteed for life, you need no friends.
It’s no different from tenured professorships. The job guarantee gives them the freedom to conduct research that will piss off even very powerful people without retaliation.
And the model I saw proposed would grant them senior status and thus maintain pay as if they were actively sitting.
Paying them to do nothing post term is a very very cheap solution to protect democracy.
The problem is (even currently) they want more money than is being paid directly by the federal govt.