SCOTUS Shakeup – Age Limits Going LIVE?!

In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on March 24, Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer voiced his support for a new limitation on Justices going forward:Age.

Saying that term limits would have made his decision regarding his retirement much simpler, he expressed the reservation that any limits on a Justice’s term of service should be long enough that the sitting Justices wouldn’t be thinking of their decisions in terms of how it would effect their re-appointment.

When asked by interviewer Kristen Welker what length of term he thought might be appropriate, he said that eighteen or twenty years seemed appropriate to him.

The 85 year-old Breyer, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, retired in 2022. His seat was subsequently filled by Biden appointee Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Age and term limits for Supreme Court service have become a hot topic for debate in recent wheels as Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s health problems have led to pressure from pundits to retire before the 2024 election. Should she remain on the bench, and should Biden lose the Presidency in November, her replacement would likely be appointed by President Trump—an eventuality which Democrats of all stripes are eager to avoid.

When asked about the recent litigation regarding former President Trump and whether it should disqualify Trump from office on 14th Amendment grounds, Breyer declined to comment. He said that It would be inappropriate to criticize his former colleagues from his position as a retiree. It is one thing, he opined, to pick apart historic decisions, such as Dredd Scott or Brown v. Board of Education, but current issues are another matter entirely.

In a similar vein, he declined to comment on specifics about Samuel Alito’s leaked opinion on the infamous Dobbs case, which reversed the Roe v. Wade decision, though he did say that he thought it was “unfortunate,” and that he had hoped for more compromise.