3 Charts that Show the Need for Supreme Court Term Limits

In recent years, the Supreme Court has amassed a degree of power that would have been unrecognizable in the founding era. In just the past few years, the Court has repeatedly ruled in ways that curtail the power of Congress and independent agencies while concentrating more power in itself. At the same time, justices are staying on the bench for longer. As a result, the stakes of appointing a justice to the Court for life have never been higher. Presidents are appointing increasingly younger justices and the intensity of confirmation battles continues to rise. This dynamic is not healthy for democracy, and it runs contrary to the principle that no one should hold too much power for too long.

These are among the reasons that reforming the Supreme Court is popular among legal scholars, elected officials, and the American people alike. Imposing 18-year term limits for the justices would improve the Court by ensuring that no single person has generational power, by regularizing appointments so that each president gets two per four-year term, and by lowering the stakes of the confirmation process.

To demonstrate how the Court has changed over time and why these reforms are needed, we’ve created data visualizations highlighting the trends toward longer tenures, narrowing confirmation votes, and the fluctuation in the number of appointments by each president.

The length of Supreme Court justices’ terms is ballooning

To illustrate how much justices’ tenures have changed over time, we created a chart of all 116 justices showing when their term began and the number of years they served. We saw a great deal of variability throughout most of the Court’s history — some justices served only a year or two while others served for decades. But in the past 60 years, that variability disappeared, and in its place a clear pattern of long tenures emerged.

Justices who started prior to 1966 stayed for a median of 15.3 years, but for those who joined the Court after 1966 (excluding the current justices), that number jumps dramatically to a median of 25.7 years.

It’s also helpful to examine changes in the durability rate, which looks at how many justices reach a certain number of years of service. For this measure, we set the durability threshold to 15 years of service. Before 1966, about half the justices remained on the bench for 15 years, and half did not. But after 1966, every single former justice served for at least 15 years. 

This is a profound change. Supreme Court justices are now more likely to spend decades on the bench, allowing them to leave a substantially greater imprint on the Court, the country, and the law than their predecessors. Replacing lifetime appointments with 18-year term limits for the justices would help counteract this trend. Regular turnover would also allow more diverse perspectives and backgrounds to be brought to the Court, making it more reflective of public values.

You can explore the data yourself here.

The number of Supreme Court appointments by each president fluctuates widely

In the current system of lifetime appointments, Supreme Court justices only leave the bench if they retire, resign, die, or are impeached and removed from office. This creates unpredictability in the appointment schedule, granting some presidents more opportunities to appoint justices than others. As a result, justices often strategically time their retirements for when their preferred political party is in the White House. This practice conflicts with the notion that justices are impartial arbiters who do not base their decisions on personal or political views.

To illustrate the variability in appointments, we compiled the number of Supreme Court appointments by president and by presidential term. The uneven distribution is evident. Four presidents did not appoint any justices (Jimmy Carter, Andrew Johnson, Zachary Taylor, and William Henry Harrison) while many others appointed four or five justices — or in the case of Andrew Jackson, six justices. (Note that George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt are anomalies: Washington appointed all of the inaugural justices and FDR served more than three terms.)

This imbalance is particularly concerning in an era where the Supreme Court has vast power in our democracy, and the opportunity to fill a vacancy carries tremendous importance.

Eighteen-year term limits would help solve this asymmetry by creating a regularized schedule for appointments. Assuming a nine-person bench, each president would get to nominate two — and only two — justices per four-year presidential term. That would take away the uncertainty created by unexpected deaths and irregular retirements and potentially help to turn down the temperature of the confirmation process. 

You can explore the data yourself here.

Senate confirmation votes have become tighter

As a result of the concentration of power in the Supreme Court and the lengthy terms served by the justices, a president’s appointment to the bench carries huge importance. Each nominee is an extension of their legacy and can effectuate or stymie a wide range of legal and policy outcomes well past when the president leaves the White House. Ideological alignment has become a significant factor in a president’s selection. And with increased polarization in Congress, this has created a dynamic in which justices are confirmed by the Senate in near party-line votes. 

This was not always the case. To show this change, we compiled the Senate’s confirmation votes for all nominees across the Court’s history. If we look at former Supreme Court justices who were confirmed in the past 60 years, they were, on average, confirmed with 94 percent of the vote. Compare that to the current justices who were confirmed with just 59 percent of the vote on average. To be sure, partisan polarization is only a part of the story, and there are other reasons why a justice may get fewer votes (consider, for example, the controversy surrounding Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh). But overall, the trend toward party-line votes speaks to growing politicization in the confirmation process. 

Term limits would help improve the confirmation process by lowering the stakes of confirming each individual justice. Right now, the confirmation battles are intense in part because that justice could potentially serve for 30 or 40 years, and the Senate does not know when the next confirmation will be. Term limits have the potential to change those dynamics by eliminating unbounded tenure and infusing the system with more predictability. That, in turn, can improve the confirmation process.

You can explore the data yourself here.

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These data visualizations make clear that key attributes of the Supreme Court’s membership and appointment process have changed over time. Congress has the authority to reform the Court and make it a more democratically accountable institution. Eighteen-year term limits would go a long way toward accomplishing that goal.