Tired of the constant wrangling in Congress about the selection and confirmation of justices for the U.S. Supreme Court? Think it's unreasonable for the highest court in the land to be subject to sudden wild swings of opinion literally from one day to the next? Concerned that the politicization of the Court and its decisions, and the concomitant erosion of respect for the Court, are not good for the country in the long run?
Me too.
As a recent piece in The New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg points out, even a bad politician can make a good suggestion now and again. Rick Perry, when he was running, had refloated an old idea for a Constitutional amendment by which justices would have 18-year terms staggered to expire every two years. This would give each President the chance to pick two new Justices during a four-year term, and reduce "stretching" a particular ideology across decades or more.
The devil is in the details, of course (would Congress still have to confirm choices, and if so, wouldn't we still have deadlock?). And one argument against is that it would make the Court's decisions subject to more frequent back-and-forth swings, rather than less.
Nevertheless, on balance, I like the idea. Justices would still be shielded from the hurly-burly of day-to-day politics, and free to focus on purely legal issues.
Amendments aren't easy to achieve. Maybe impossible, in today's bitterly divided, ideologically infused Congress. But it might be worth a try. And while we're at it, maybe we could also patch up the Constitutional oversight that denies residents of the District of Columbia the right to be represented in Congress in the same way as all other citizens.

