Public Opinion on Term Limits and Other Supreme Court Reforms

The prospect of implementing term limits for Supreme Court justices is gaining traction in institutional settings, academia, and the public. Proponents argue that this reform would decrease the politicization of the judicial appointment process by requiring routine, planned appointments instead of waiting for sudden changes on the bench, such as a justice’s death, that produce high-stakes partisan fights over ideological control of the Court. Term limits would also eliminate strategic retirements — justices timing their retirements to occur when a favored president is in office — which allow the justices themselves to influence the Court’s ideological makeup.

Though term limits could be implemented through a constitutional amendment, there is also strong support for creating them by federal statute, consistent with the Constitution’s charge that justices “hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” Under one such proposal, justices would still have life tenure, but Congress would require them to take senior status after 18 years, which would trigger a vacancy on a staggered basis every two years. Reforms of this nature require broad-based public support to have a chance at becoming law. For a constitutional amendment, that support must be at near-consensus levels (e.g., greater than 75 to 80 percent). The statutory proposal would require at least robust majority public support from Republicans and Democrats to build momentum for congressional action and a presidential signature.

Below, I report findings summarizing public support for term limits in comparison with other reforms. This comparison places term limits in the context of reforms in similar categories (e.g., appointments) and different ones (e.g., Court power and independence), highlights what aspects of the Court’s institutional features the public likes or dislikes, and explains which reforms elicit large or small partisan divides. In a basic process of representation, public demand for policies can translate to policy change, but congressional agenda-setting and gridlock in the lawmaking process are critical mediators that influence outcomes. Measuring levels of public support, as well as partisan divides in that support, helps gauge the likelihood of term limits and other reforms both receiving attention from elected officials and eventually becoming law.

I measured public support for ten Supreme Court reforms across nine nationally representative public opinion surveys fielded by Ipsos and YouGov from 2020 to 2023. Five of these reforms, including term limits, relate to judicial appointments and tenure:

1. Create term limits for justices.
2. Establish a mandatory retirement age for justices.
3. Allow citizens to directly elect Supreme Court justices via national elections.
4. Establish periodic elections giving citizens the ability to retain individual Supreme Court justices or have the president replace them.
5. Require two-thirds of the Senate to confirm a Supreme Court justice.

Three of the reforms are “Court-curbing” measures centered on reducing the Court’s power and independence in the political system:

1. Allow citizens to overturn the Supreme Court’s rulings via national referendums.
2. Allow the Supreme Court’s constitutional rulings to be overturned by ordinary federal laws.
3. Increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court (beyond nine justices).

The last two reforms are “Court-empowering” methods to enhance the Court’s authority in the political system:

1. Impose penalties for federal government officials who do not comply with Supreme Court rulings.
2. Impose penalties for citizens who do not comply with Supreme Court rulings.

Figure 1 displays a rank ordering of the popularity of these ten reforms. The figure reports the percentage of respondents (averaging over all nine surveys) who support each reform. It shows that five reforms (including term limits) have supermajority support (greater than 70 percent), three reforms have bare majority support, and two have only minority support. Term limits is tied with mandatory retirement age, a similar reform, as the second most popular reform, with about 73 percent support. While the public seems to have a preference against life tenure, it also shows substantial support for the two Court-empowerment items. In fact, the most popular reform, with 86 percent support, is imposing penalties on government officials for noncompliance with Court rulings. Imposing penalties on citizens is the fourth most popular and receives ample support of just under 73 percent.

The fifth reform receiving supermajority support is changing the Senate confirmation vote threshold to two-thirds instead of the bare majority. Supreme Court nominations once required 60 percent support (due to the filibuster) to advance to a final vote, but the Senate lowered that threshold in 2017, during Neil Gorsuch’s nomination. An even higher confirmation threshold (i.e., two-thirds, or 67 percent) would force the president to choose a more moderate, “consensus” nominee who could garner sufficiently high bipartisan support, instead of an ideologically reliable nominee who can garner only copartisan support.

Two other reforms related to appointments and tenure — elections for selection and retention — barely have majority support, suggesting that term limits and mandatory retirement are much more viable options for changing the status quo on this front. Elections for Supreme Court justices have historically had little momentum among elites despite how popular and widespread they are at the state level.

The Court-curbing reforms are the least popular. While support for overturning Court rulings via referenda just surpasses 50 percent, adding seats and overturning constitutional rulings via ordinary laws do not have majority support.

For significant reforms to become law, they must enjoy widespread, bipartisan support — especially for constitutional amendments, but also for ordinary legislation. This dynamic in the public, combined with political and social movements, can then spur congressional action. The figure below shows public support for the ten reforms among Democrats and Republicans separately. Term limits receive ample support from Republicans (61 percent) and supermajority support from Democrats (84 percent). However, while the reforms enjoy strong support across party, this partisan gap is non-negligible, particularly compared to the degree of near-consensus support for penalizing government officials for noncompliance — over 85 percent support from both sides and a negligible partisan division.

Support for a mandatory retirement age shows a similar pattern to its companion reform of term limits, although with slightly lower partisan division. Support for two-thirds Senate confirmation elicits an analogous pattern. Thus, the three popular reforms related to appointments and tenure bring about robust majority support from Democrats and Republicans. The modestly sized partisan divisions, with Democrats consistently more favorable, are most likely due to Democrats being outpartisans relative to the Court and Republicans being copartisans.

Thus far, descriptive findings show bipartisan public support for term limits at a level that could possibly spur congressional action on the statutory proposal, but probably not at the consensus level required for a constitutional amendment. From this data, the reform with the highest consensus levels, and perhaps the highest likelihood of becoming a constitutional amendment, is penalizing government officials for noncompliance. The five least popular reforms with large partisan divisions, even the ones that have bare majority support from the public, would most likely be dead on arrival as either constitutional amendments or statutory proposals. And some of those less popular reforms, such as requiring judicial elections rather than appointments, would require constitutional amendments.

Another important factor for understanding whether public support can spur congressional action centers on the stability of public support. If public support changes drastically as a function of Court decisions or political events, then that support is more ephemeral than persistent. Politicians may perceive such support as instrumental as opposed to principled and regard that as an unreliable foundation on which to make a case for policy change. If support is more principled and stable, politicians can draw on bipartisan public support that can also “weather political storms” as justification for official action.

Figure 3 displays support for term limits and two other reforms across six time periods. For two other projects (including an article on the 2020 election), my collaborator, Eric Kramon, and I deliberately fielded surveys before and after significant events, such as the challenges to the 2020 election results and the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion overturning a constitutional right to an abortion. We chose the following six time periods:

1. Early October 2020, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and after Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination, but before Barrett’s confirmation
2. Late October 2020, after Barrett was confirmed but before Election Day
3. November 2020, after the election was called for Joe Biden
4. December 2020, after the Supreme Court dismissed the Trump-backed lawsuit challenging the election results
5. Late January 2021 and April 2021, after Biden was inaugurated
6. September 2022, November 2022, and March 2023, after Dobbs

The point of Figure 3 is to compare the stability of term limits with two other reforms that are illustrative of different patterns. Note that Figure 3 displays support among all survey respondents as well as support among Democrats and Republicans.

Figure 3A shows that, on the whole, support for term limits is fairly stable over time, even across some tumultuous political events. Polarizing movements among partisans — with support from Democrats increasing and Republicans decreasing — occur following two events: Barrett’s confirmation, which followed a highly politicized process where Republicans reversed course from 2016 on election-year appointments, and Dobbs, an ideologically charged decision. Both events, which favored conservative Republican interests, once again show the consequences of Democrats as outpartisans and Republicans as copartisans. Importantly, these changes are not substantial, and the first change is somewhat short-lived. Moreover, changes in Democratic support are occurring around a very high baseline average of over 80 percent. That Republican support hovers around the 50 percent threshold at times suggests that Republican support could be a bit more tenuous.

The degree of stability, including partisan stability, in support for term limits falls somewhere in between that of support for overturning rulings via referendum (Figure 3B) and penalizing government officials for noncompliance (Figure 3C). For the former, the obvious pattern in Figure 3B is the large and polarizing partisan change following Dobbs. This Court-curbing reform is particularly susceptible to change following ideologically charged Supreme Court decisions like Dobbs. Additionally, the change is occurring around the majority threshold (50 percent), which cuts against the broad-based bipartisan support required to spur congressional action. After Dobbs, Democratic support for overturning rulings via referendum increased by 16 percentage points, while Republican support decreased by 8 points. Moreover, from postelection 2020 to Biden’s inauguration, Democratic support decreased, while Republican support increased, which is most likely rooted in the anticipation that Biden would have the ability to appoint justices to fill future Court vacancies.

Finally, Figure 3C shows that public support for penalizing government officials for noncompliance is mostly stable and at very high levels for both Democrats and Republicans. Though the decrease in Democratic support after Dobbs is about 10 percent, that post-Dobbs level of support is still a very high 80 percent.

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Public support for term limits is quite high, has bipartisan support, and is relatively stable. The results show a general public demand for changes to the appointment process and justices’ tenure. These features of public support for term limits as well as mandatory retirement age could possibly mobilize congressional action on statutory measures that require majority passage and a presidential signature.

Brandon L. Bartels is a professor of political science at George Washington University.