A Hat Tip to Dummocrats for linking to the Wall Street Journal article advocating in favor of Term Limits for the Supreme Court. I support term limits for Representatives, Senators, Judges and Administrators and I have carefully considered all the hypothetical reasons why term limits would potentially be bad for the public. The following paragraph zero’s in on the key point: power, and the rotation of individuals into and out of positions of power.
“A major reason for justices doggedly hanging on to their seats is, simply put, power. The Framers of the Constitution never envisioned a judiciary as powerful as today's courts. But with that unaccountable power has come an erosion of the court's legitimacy. Many people increasingly question if elderly justices with thought patterns set a half-century ago can fully comprehend court cases that encompass the globalization of the world economy or file-sharing on the Internet. "The Founders could not foresee that increases in longevity would imperil the rotation in powerful office essential to representative government," write former law school deans Roger Cramton and Paul Carrington.”In an extended discussion on her blog, Althouse argues for using social pressure rather than law to pressure elderly or incapacitated Judges from the Court. This would be a valid solution if you believe the problem with the Supreme Court is simply individuals overstaying their welcome. On the contrary, I believe the problem is that institutional stagnation and intransigence directly undermines the whole concept of citizen control of the government, and the source of the institutional problem is unlimited individual time in power.
The revolutionary concept in America is that all just power originates from the inherent rights of individuals, and for power to transcend oppression it must always be understood and exercised as a gift from the citizens. The Founding Fathers understood that power is both intoxicating and addictive, and the method they conceived to minimize abuse of power was to divide it among several institutions. What we are witnessing in our lifetime is the evidence that institutional distribution of power is no longer a sufficiently adequate check on the problems of power over other humans.
It is time that the division of power takes on a defined temporal component. If you believe that all government power is a gift from the public, do you also believe that the ownership of that power remains with the public? In other words, if power over the affairs of others comes from the inherent individual rights those being governed, then citizens can only transfer the utility of power and not the ownership. In my opinion, individuals holding onto power until it is wrested from them are acting in a manner consistent with the belief that the power is their personal possession. When the love of power is the primary motivation, the welfare of the public, by definition, is secondary.
