Lifetime Appointments to The Supreme Court

"The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office."

--Article III, Constitution of the United States

Article III is one of the lengthier Articles, but if you pick your way through it, this is the only sentence which describes how long the judges of the Supreme Court will hold their office. There is no mention of lifetime appointments. There is no mention of how many supreme court justices there ought to be. There is no mention of electing judges to the "inferior courts."

Most of the discussions I find on line say this is "generally understood" to mean lifetime appointments or it "is widely accepted" that saying the judges hold their offices during good Behaviour," means a lifetime appointment.

Excuse me. I realize I am a simple New Hampshire rube. But I went to college once and I can still speak and read English, despite all that, and I do not see a lifetime appointment in "during good Behaviour."

Nowhere in this article is the number of justices spelled out to be nine. When Franklin Roosevelt suggested he might add more justices to out vote the nine old men thwarting the will of the people to take some action to fight the Depression, he was accused of trying to "pack" the court in an unconstitutional seizure of power and even his own Democratic legislators declined to support him.

But nowhere in the Constitution, far as I can see, is there anything that says nine justices or appointed for life.

Rick Perry, in one of his rare moments of lucidity, has proposed a constitutional amendment to limit the terms of the justices of the supreme court--but I don't see that is necessary. Looks to me as if Congress could simply pass a law. The supreme court could over rule it, but then we could go for the amendment.

Of course, if Rick Perry is for anything, it does give one pause. Perhaps we ought to think this through more carefully.

But his argument, that the current system is broken, that justices hold on until a President who shares their own political views is in office so they can retire with a replacement who shares their beliefs, that a President can, by appointing a conservative (or a liberal) justice have power long after he leaves office, that we are stuck with bad justices for longer than is healthy for the country, are all cogent arguments.

The usual arguments for lifelong supreme court tenure coalesce around the idea we want the justices rendering opinions uninfluenced by political passions of the moment; we want "judicial independence" which means wise men and women applying the law to individual cases and we do not want judges imposing politics or personal philosophy through verdicts; we do not want justices in effect, imposing laws of their own by using case law to do it.

But examples of the supreme court justices doing all of these undesirable things are legion; none of the desirable effects we have hoped for have come to fruition: the justices use their own prejudices and philosophies as the basis for their decision and use the law only as window dressing to justify how they reached the conclusions they began with.

That you can look at a justice and know in advance how he or she will vote if you are given a three sentence summary of any given case with significant social/cultural content means if you know the judge's personal prejudices you know how he or she will rule and that means we do not, and likely never will, have a really "independent" judiciary which rules as the law dictates without injecting their own beliefs into the case.

So, we might as well admit the obvious--judges are political appointees who rule according to their own conservative or liberal philosophies. So let's fashion a system which recognizes this and try to make the best of an inherently imperfect situation.