I think they should be elected, have terms like other government officials

I'll half agree with you...I definitely think they need term limits, but I don't think they should be elected. I like the idea of being appointed because they are put in place by their merits and not by campaign. Politicians have a habit of saying things they know will win votes, and then get elected only to not act in accordance with what they said. I like the idea of the justices being appointed because they are there purely based on their past judiciary experience and morals.

Now congress on the other hand...definitely need term limits there. Too many career politicians that don't do jack for their constituency, and no one will run against them because they know they will lose.

Would term limits alter the behavior of politicians at all though? How poorly would their final term be if they knew they were out no matter what?

I think the larger problem is people voting for poor candidates mostly because they feel they need to, or they just don't know the issues. Unfortunately, most voters will never accept this kind of blame. And the media makes it worse these days with their toxic behavior and lies.

Probably should retire at like 80 or 85 so they don’t have to scramble to find a new judge

That makes sense

Thank you

Unfortunately I’ve never heard of this chap (different country).
However if he was up to carrying out the duties of office in a professional manner I don’t think his length of term should be of any consequence.
Did he do something wrong ?

Peace.

I am against the ELECTION of judges and also against those with political power to appoint them. If you see how Trump tries to get the supreme court to his political benefit you can see why. No president should have that power.
I believe in the dividing of power, and therefore if democracy or politics in general appoint judges, judges will rather be fulfilling a political function than be serving the law and constitution like they should, and they should therefore be above politics in any way!

Now when it comes to a time limit, this is always a point of discussion. The power of judges is limited. They may not have an opinion of their own, they merely need to check if something is violating the law or not, and in the case of a high/supreme court this can even be a country's constitution. The time limit for political leaders is often in place because their power is much bigger and we can see in some country's what negative results can come from a person being in charge for too long, as power can get into your head. A judge should not be in such a position. A judge normally only gets in charge when people believe something to be against the law and then a judge must compare the stuff brought in with the rules stated in the law and come to a verdict. Their personal opinion counts not at all where a politician has a bit rule to shape their politics to their personal opinion... heck their choice for joining a political party is even based on that. Judges who are inexperienced may easily come to the wrong verdict where experienced judges can based on their experience get stuff straightened out better. The problem with a function you have for life is though that you can fall victim over time for diseases, impairments and other stuff that can cloud your judgment. In a function for life you cannot be set out of your function, but what if a supreme judge is diagnosed with Alzheimer? Or what if they get an accident causing permanent brain damage? Those are factors that should be weighted for a judge to be forced to leave. An actual time limit as set for presidents, that's something I'm not sure about when it handles supreme judges. Their function is different.

Dividing powers was the idea set by Montesquieu, who has been the bases of the current dividing of power in 3 groups in which the group justice is most prominently set apart from the others, and Montesquieu did so for a reason. And they should also NEVER be regarded as government officials.

So how would judges be appointed then? Would the Supreme Court just appoint its own members in your view?

As far as I know that is how other countries do overall do it in deed. This way politicians cannot influence the way the court casts its judgment, or at least the chance is smaller.

Now we can see how Trump is trying to define his political views on the country even if Biden should win by making sure the supreme court is set up with members who may overrule Biden in every opportunity they get, and that can undermine democracy. If you look at Poland, you can see things even going to a further extreme as the government fired all judges there and replaced them with their own, and as a result the government can effectively violate the law and constitution knowing the judges will do anything in their power to find the loopholes to cast the verdict in the government's favor and so the court loses its independence and with Poland being a EU member, the EU is really worried about Poland becoming a totalitarian dictatorship again. Poland is not the only country the EU is worried about when it comes to EU member states, and there outside the EU there are countries were we see the same thing happening. Having members of the government and a president in particular to be able to appoint judges is nasty business, especially when its a function for life.

In the Netherlands we have the "Raad van State" is a kind of supreme court. The head of this council appoints all members including the leader (as the head does not participate in the cases). In the NL this is the monarch, and since the monarch has little to none political powers in the NL and may not take a political position even, this works. De Raad van State only goes about conflicts between civilian and government or about government actions being against the law/constitution or not. De Hoge Raad (High council) is also a supreme court, but overall only judging non-political cases. Here the government and parliament have a say about the members, but as the judges here are only about non-political cases (like civilian vs. big company or even crime cases), and this council only coming to play when judges before them came with a verdict lawyers/prosecutors disagreed with many times, this is not too much of an issue. The parliament/government do not appoint the member of the Hoge Raad directly, so candidates who are too politically set can still be filtered out somehow.

There is a limit in how far democracy can go, or it can become its own greatest enemy. High/supreme courts were invented to prevent this.

Here’s the thing I do have an issue with. I do think judges should be held accountable for their decisions and currently they can’t really be held accountable except in the court of public opinion if they make a bad decision. If you end up with a court that is legislating from the bench and changing all sorts of laws, there’s nothing anyone can do about it. You can certainly repeal laws, but you can’t stop the court from pushing their agenda if they decide to push one. That’s why I like the way my state Supreme Court is run. Judges are democratically elected in order to weed out the judges the public doesn’t want and it works pretty well.

Actually that doesn't work at all. In that sense you would lay justice in the hands of unqualified people, which is by far more devastating, and in several countries where the influence goes so far we can already see the terrible results of that.
Now it is a kind of misconception that judges cannot be held accountable. Even judges in supreme court can be held accountable, however the people judging them are normally not authorized to get into the case itself. Please note the perfect system cannot exist, however judges should be able to arise above politics. Having them chosen democratically kills the very purpose we have a justice system for in general, as a matter of fact, it would make their use completely obsolete. If there's a president having an election program that is a violation with every line written in the constitution but the people chose that idiot, they are also very likely to chose judges who would turn a blind eye to that or seek out the loopholes.

It is for a reason why the same Greeks who invented democracy were also in large numbers against it. Plato even advocated that democracy itself will be the biggest threat to democracy. His opinion will be proven right when judges are appointed by either politicians or the people. Some countries in Eastern Europe (some even EU members but not all of them) are already dying as democracies due to the court being entirely chosen by government officials, and quite a lot of them even revered by their people for that. A judge verdict is rarely what the people want to hear, but a judge must not be there to gain popularity. A judge must be there to uphold the law and constitution. The law is rarely convenient, but needed. All that chosen judges will lead to is the forming a banana republic, and unfortunately, that is a fact. I don't like that fact either, but we'll have to deal with it. Judges must be above public opinion... A chosen judge can never be that, as they do have election promises to keep. Judges must always be above politics in any way, and always be independent. You proposal makes conflicts of interest inevitable, unfortunately. I wish it were different.

Judges may be neither left, right, progressive, green, conservative, capitalist, communist, whatever. They must be like computers. Following their programming (which is coded in the programming language called "law") precisely. A judge must even be able to cast their personal opinion aside if it violates the law. C'est la vie

Saying judges must be impartial sounds good in theory and is definitely an ideal to live up to, but the reality is that that just isn’t the case. Different people are raised to have different beliefs and have different opinions and life experiences. Even if you were to hire the most impartial people possible, it’s not common to get a universal consensus on what the law is. That’s just the best case scenario. Judges are people too and they aren’t infallible. They are open to influence whether it be their personal beliefs, financial bribes, or some other forms of corruption. At least with elections or term limits, you have a chance of getting the bad ones out. No it’s not perfect, but nothing is as far as governments are concerned.

I never said they were infalible. They are humans after all. It's for a reason judges of a high court never cast a verdict alone. With elections you will always encourage them to do that what they must NOT do, and thus elections should never be even considered, and is even downright stupid to propose, sorry for stating it that bluntly, but you gotta face the facts. The people are simply not qualified. They never studied the depths of the law and order, mostly they don't eve care, and where not trained to cast their personal feelings aside, which is something a judge must do every day they are on duty. Elections will only get bad ones in, not filter bad ones out. Judges may not make electoral promises, they cannot have a program, frankly they may do nothing... Only judge if the law was violated or not. Montesquieu was so strict on the power of justice being separated from the other powers precisely to allow them to cast their own opinions aside. BECAUSE they are human too, they may not be tempted into political gain, and that is precisely what elections do. And that is also precisely what being appointed by a politician of any kind (especially a president with as much power as the president of the US) does. You can see that Trump is appointing judges, for example with the promise presidents can overrule abortion rights in states that have it by means of federal law. Now aside from my personal view on that specific topic, the judge then has the political task at hand, even overruling a state, which as far as I know the constitution forbids, but since the US constitution is very vague a judge can always find loopholes, and so the president can abuse the high-court to get things done. That may never be possible, and that is how the high court in the US functions. As an instrument of the president to abuse. And the democrats are equally guilty as they are very hard on it to make sure the just died judge (forgot her name) is replaced by a more progressive judge. That has nothing to do with justice or upholding the constitution. That is merely using the high-court as an instrument to interpret the constitution to your own political favor. That is solid evidence that the US high-court doesn't function at all. Elections will make that even worse, as it will judges then be acting not based on the law, but on public opinion, and when that happens the nation is doomed to its deathbed.

Sounds odd, but you advocated the very reason why election are not an option!

Okay, it’s pretty clear we just aren’t going to agree on this topic. I think a compromise would be in order then. I and most other Americans don’t really like the idea of a court appointing its own members as the courts aren’t infallible and the closest the US has to a monarch would be the President, who is already in charge of picking a nominee for the Senate to confirm so there’s no change there. My compromise for getting accountability for the US Supreme Court is this: The President still picks the nominee and the Senate still has to confirm them. Nothing changes on that front. The only thing that changes is that the public can recall a judge if they feel they made the wrong call on a case. If enough signatures are collected (I’ll go with 1M signatures based on the population of the US being around 325M), a recall petition is held nationwide. If the people vote in favor of recall, the judge is recalled and the President pick a new nominee. This is certainly not perfect, but it does introduce accountability into a system where it is needed.

What you don't like and what is to be done are always too different things. I don't like it either. However this is one of the points where full freedom will only lead to terminating the entire idea of freedom. In most high courts I know the one or ones appointing the members do not take part in the actual verdict in cases and vice versa. This is done precisely to catch up with the idea that humans are not infallible. A judge appointed by democracy, either by a direct vote or by a presidential decree or another political means, always has political interest and can therefore not be free of conflict of interests and that is what a judge must be as free of as possible. If people recall a judge when they make the wrong decision, you basically allow the people to overrule the law, and nothing but trouble can come from that in, well say 100% of the cases the high court has to handle. Please note, the high court only comes to play when democracy fails, and that fact alone makes that democratic chosen judges cannot do their job at all. What you propose may for the short term look like freedom, but is in the end a free ticket to bypass all laws completely. To put it even more bluntly, the people then have the power to force the supreme court to justify a murder on the president if all the people want to get rid of him, as they may otherwise recall the judges.... Extreme case, I know... very extreme, but yet that is possible with your proposal, and that is an irrefutable fact. If you don't want that, then you should respect the fact that political power should be seperated from the power of court...

Three powers. The political power (democracy), the executive power (do what has to be done, regardless if people want it, but you know it must be done. This power does by the way also execute the stuff democracy decided before on... most of the time), and the power of justice (court). Only when these three powers remain divided from each other, the system can work in the interest of both people and nation, and also ensure the freedom Americans are so full about. When one of the branches get too much power of any other, the system will fail and drive a nation to its deathbed or be the seed of (civil) war. History is actually full of the mistake to try to combine the powers and loads of misery as a result. WWII can for a part be explained by it... If you don't wanna repeat the mistakes of the past, don't make supreme court democratic.

I don’t think SCOTUS justices should be elected necessarily. It makes sense for one of the 3 branches in our checks-and-balances system to be appointed rather than directly accountable to the electorate. The pressures of campaigning would expose SCOTUS to undue influence by special interests and basically turn them into politicians wearing robes.

Did you know there is actually no constitutional requirement that SCOTUS justices have any prior experience as judges or even have law degrees? As a lawyer, I find this rather frightening, especially in conjunction with crazy talk about seating Ivanka Trump or whomever to RBG’s newly vacant seat.

Never gonna happen: even the extremely nepotistic Trump seems to understand SCOTUS is an institution to be respected and not staffed with his own family members.

But I do think the confirmation process and/or the structure of the Court itself needs to change because the politics around it have grown too toxic.

There were some proposals along those lines by various candidates in the Democratic primaries (Buttigieg for instance), but I’m not aware that Biden has a specific proposal.

imgflip.com/i/4fzptt I'm AbOuT tO gO lOcO

Meh, I wouldn't worry too much about it. I unfeatured it. I'll talk to him.

And his tag like ytf is he out to hurt me

Well just let me know if he keeps it up.

This isn't ok...

I could get behind an election for them, but if it were changed to that, we definitely need term limits, too.
I also favor safety nets that address fitness of mind and cognitive abilities.

Oh hey Katechuks, Yes I think they should, because people say as you get older you get wiser, in most cases, this is not true as people get older they become more delusional and that leads them to make bad choices for America and could throw us into another bad situation, America is bad enough already we don't need it to get worse, oh wait, it already has...

i say yes so the senate can be fair before the boomers die.

Perhaps a term limit would be a good idea, maybe around 20 years.

I do not believe they should be elected however. First off, we'd have to decide if they should be elected on a national or regional scale. A national election most certainly wouldn't work because then the court could be full of whatever party is currently in favor. Each justice being elected from 1 of 9 different regions might be a more feasible idea though.

To me though, Supreme Court Justice requires much more background in the subject than either other branch should. Many different kinds of people can be president or congressperson, but Supreme Court requires extensive background in law. That's why I think it's better to have them appointed and confirmed, rather than the people electing someone who very possibly knows nothing about law.

Does the comment I link break the Terms?
‘Cuz the image of the com seems sus
https://imgflip.com/i/4g1p1t?nerp=1600920081#com6066596

Yes, the user is gone now though

Ok

No