What should the age limit be for Congress and Supreme Court?

I’m thinking 75.

Not a bad thought, tbh, but we evolve as a nation and a people. I say let’s tie it to the expected life span of a US citizen (maybe that -5?).

How fast until we see universal health care, then?


Half the president’s age minus 7.

Supreme Court needs age limits and term limits. I’d go with 75 and max 20 years service.

70 , and they lose all benefits upon leaving office, but are eligible for the full maximum social security benefit and medicare. I am pretty sure they already get a generous pension going by this post from 2017.

I absolutely hate term limits of any kind on elected officials. Think someone’s too old? Vote 'em out.

Dumb term limit laws are how Virginia got stuck with an asshole like Glen Youngkin.

Yup. Either they can do the job or they can’t. The problem we face as a nation is that people will now vote for someone that clearly can’t do the job, and that’s not a problem you can solve with age limits.

But there’s probably some merit to term limits for the Supreme Court since it’s not an elected body.

Which does not apply to the Supreme Court, of course.

Honestly if SC noms were on a regularly scheduled interval, and there was a sunset date on the nomination, there would be a change in the incentives and would reduce some of the high stakes fuckery.

13 Supremes, one for each federal district, 20 year term limits, one appointment every two years with the extra being scheduled every 6 years 8 months. So every presidential term is guaranteed 2 nominations, and an extra floater every term and a half.

Then we wouldn’t see Barret or Kavanaugh for the next 30 years+, Obama would have had 5, maybe 6 appointments, and Son of a Mitch could not have pulled his election year bullshit.

100% there is. As much as I am against any sort of artificial term limit for elected officials, I am also against lifetime political appointments to a political body (and yes, that’s the Supreme Court.)

When the founders wrote the Constitution, they were operating under two states of being that have since gone away:

  1. There would be no political parties in the US, and even if they were, the Supreme Court would remain apolitical (shortsighted as hell, that last bit), and

  2. The average age for a white male adult at the time of writing on the Constitution was about 47-50 years old. So those “lifetime” appointments were largely going to last 5-10 years tops.

Sure, age limits seem like a good idea now, but that’s how you get Carousel.

This is a really common misconception. Yes, modern average lifespans are much higher than they have been historically, but that’s not because our old people are living to be older than old people in olden times. It’s because we lose a lot less children to starvation/disease than we used to. All it takes is a handful of deaths of people age 0-5 to REALLY mess with the averages. Has a much bigger mathematical impact than people living to 80 instead of 75.

The initial supreme court as appointed by George Washington had I think four members that served 10+ years, and one of those served 20+ years. Of the shorter serving ones, it wasn’t death that removed them in most cases. It was resignation. The first chief Justice, John Jay, resigned after only ~5 years of service and then proceeded to live another ~25 years.

I’m all for (say) 15 year appointments to the Supreme Court. There could even be an option to be re-appointed. Anything is better than being irrevocably shackled some hacky choice for 40+ years.

But absolute age limits on ordinary elected officials don’t make much sense. Like triggercut says, vote 'em out if you don’t like old people serving. That’s what elections are for.

There’s also the unpleasant truth that, behind the populist facade, the people pushing hardest for term limits over the decades have not been those who want a healthy democracy. Instead, the long-term goal has been to reduce both the legislative expertise and the political clout of elected officials, so that all the laws can be drafted instead by unelected billionaires and lobbyists, with elected officials just acting as stooges instead of independent actors. The ALEC crowd, in other words.

Yup, in the 1780s if you survived to adolescence - and many did not, childhood diseases being much more deadly at the time - and were in a cushy station of life like anyone likely to be appointed to the Supreme Court, you had an excellent chance of living to 70 or older.

(Our old people today are living to be older by a bit - old people back then generally died in their 70s rather than their 80s - but the overwhelming reason life expectancies at birth back then were so low was infant and child mortality. And also women dying in childbirth, but that’s not relevant for Supreme Court nominees of the time …)

Ah…nope.

Washington’s first 6 appointments to the first Supreme Court went like this :

John Jay, nearly 6 years as Chief Justice. Quit the bench to become Governor of New York state. Served a term doing that, and then declined being reinstated to the Supreme Court again because his wife had just died, and he felt the need to care for his family. Another manifestation of shorter life spans even amongst those who’d reached the age of 40 in the early 19th century – poor health of family members/spouses that need care. Extra points for coming back 210 years after leaving the bench to play center field in Major League Baseball.

James Wilson Didn’t spend a bunch of his time on the bench, because he was in debtor’s jail. Died at age 55 in 1798 after 8 years, 10 months of having the office. And spending time in debtor’s prison. If we check with the judges, I think we’re going to find that his tenure was less than 10 years. :)

John Rutledge Served then resigned out of boredom, then in vying for the CJ gig after Jay left, said some terrible things about the Jay Treaty, and the senate refused to confirm him as Chief Justice. (Rutledge did take a recess appointment to be Chief Justice, but when it came time for his formal confirmation, that was a no from the Senate.). Rutledge unsuccessfully committed suicide, and died a few years later at age 60. Not very old, y’know? And yes, resigned (possibly due to health concerns with depression)…but wouldn’t have made it ten years on the bench before dying anyway.

William Cushing THERE WE GO. 20 years on the bench. He’s the one. Notice the singular.

John Blair, Jr. Served until 1795. Left the court after that due to his own health concerns, and retired to his estate to live out the last 5 years of his life. Died at age 68. Kinda old. But not really by modern SCOTUS standards. But yet another “Resigned…for ill health.”

Robert Hanson Harrison. Nominated by Washington, a few months later had to demur and tell Washington he was in bad health and doubted he could serve. Died a few months after that. 45 years old when he passed.

Washington planned a 6-judge court. When Harrison couldn’t serve and Wilson was going to be indisposed, James Iredell and Thomas Johnson were both appointed. Iredell died in office at age 48 in 1799 after 9 years on the bench. Wilson lasted just a few years and resigned for ill health.

So, as a matter of fact, of the first 12 justices appointed by Washington up until John Marshall, the average service on the Court was 8.78 years. Under 10 years. (And that’s with grouchy ol’ Bushrod Washington serving 30-something years and skewing the average. The median and not the mean of those 12 was 5.7 years. Average age at death: 64, Median is 61.

The other thing to point out is that as originally designed by the Judiciary Act of 1789, justices to the Supreme Court were expected to ride circuit to the three circuit appeals courts in the US. Which was, frankly, a pain in the ass to anyone – and thus a calculation into the lifetime appointments thing. (In fact, Iredell died while doing his circuit visit of a heart attack at age 48.)

But also, I wanted to address this misconception:

So yeah. About that.

First, we kind of don’t know the lifespan of United States citizens with any good hard data until about 1848 or so. But in 1848, the life expectancy of all Americans at birth was a shade under 39 years. But that’s from birth.

But we can make some pretty decent lifespan/age expectancy estimates before that. And of course and most importantly, life expectancy is a sliding scale that adjusts on the demographics of the age of the persons you’re asking about, too. And that’s the important part here.

So. In 1800, as best as we can determine, if you lived to be 40 years old, your life span was about 52 years. You had another 12, on average. If you made it to 50, you get another 10. Make it to 60, and you get 7-8. etc.

So when I said:

I was using a shorthand for adults past the age of 30 who’d survived the childhood diseases and perils of that era. So…not a misconception, thanks. If you got to be 30 years old or 35 years old, in 1800 you still had a life expectancy that didn’t run too far past 50 years old, on average.

The Founders also assumed Justices would be somewhat older in the first place because you’d have to have a lot of time doing it before you’d even be considered for the position.

Having read the Federalist Papers recently they assumed a lot of stuff that didn’t really pan out.

I’d do a guarantee every president gets a Justice every Congress, and that determines size of the court.

If the court goes below 7, vacanies can be filled up to 7 in addition to the one every Congressional term.

Not sure where you’re getting those numbers. Based on table 8 of this paper, if a white* male in the US in 1795 made it to age 20, they could expect to live another 47.5 years on average - i.e. to about 68. At birth, though, a white male child in 1795 could expect to live only 44 years on average, so fierce was child mortality.

Mind you, life expectancy dipped soon after in the mid-19th century, likely due to industrialization and other factors. Then it started to climb in the late 19th and early 20th century, due to things like better nutrition, modern medicine, public health, safety standards etc.

Nowadays, a white US male can expect to live to 75 - both at birth and at age 20 (though it’s trending down, alas, due to COVID.)

*A major qualification, though a relevant one for the present discussion, since the chance of a non-white or non-male getting nom’d to the Supreme Court in 1795 was zero. It’s also true that the popular misconception Tortilla is talking about mainly revolves around elites - the poster child being G.R.R. Martin opining that monarchs in the middle ages were in their 20s or 30s because they croaked by 40. (In fact on average medieval European nobles died in their 50s. Though of course there were some quite young medieval monarchs, e.g. Henry III of England.)

New-ish analysis by the Census Bureau with regards to their datasets from the mid-19th century.