Jesse Wegman

Yeah, I mean every president chooses judges who are – they think will be ideologically aligned with them and that's understandable.

But at the same time, this interacts with this life tenure that the founders gave to Supreme Court – well, to all federal judges.

And this creates a problem because now you have people living far longer than they did at the founding …

people serving on the court like Clarence Thomas for 30-plus years.

He could go 40.

He could even go 50 years.

He's not even that old by the standards of Supreme Court justices.

And I think when you have presidents appointing justices who sit on the court that long, then you add on top of that presidents who were chosen by a minority of the population and

You have essentially minority rule in America where you have the judiciary representing political realities from decades before and sometimes not even a reality that was – that represented the majority of the people.

So I think you have a real problem with a court that is so unrepresentative politically.

You know, the court is not supposed to be democratically representative the way that the elected branches are.

But when it is so far removed, I think you start to run into serious problems of legitimacy.

Right.

Well, this has been suggested for a long time, but term limits for Supreme Court justices, I think, would go a long way to making people feel more like that the court was a democratically legitimate branch of government.

So the most popular proposal out there is 18-year terms.

So on a nine-member Supreme Court, that would mean that every two years,

a new vacancy would open up and every president would, by definition, get two appointments to the Supreme Court per term.

The justices who finish their 18-year term would be allowed to stay on as senior justices, which is the system we have now in the lower federal courts of appeals.

But I think it would make a really big difference in giving people the sense that there wouldn't be this unpredictability, this sort of unfairness where one president gets four picks to the court and the next one gets zero.

We want a Supreme Court that basically reflects the country as it is today, not as it was decades ago.