“For many Americans, the Supreme Court is a distant, secretive, unelected body that can make drastic changes in their lives without any accountability,” said co-sponsor Virginia Rep. Don Beyer. “I have long supported reforming the Supreme Court to limit terms to end lifetime tenures and ensure the court remains a fair and impartial arbiter of justice. Our bill would achieve this and help restore balance to a heavily politicized court.”

In a release, Khanna said he was not worried about the 18-year limits further politicizing the court, as some opponents claim.

“The regular appointment process will help judges rotate more frequently instead of justices waiting to retire based on which party controls the White House and holds a Senate majority,” he said. “Confirmation hearings will also become an expected and regular part of the process instead of a life-and-death partisan fight that only further erodes the public’s trust in the court.”

Fix the Court’s Roth says 18 years is a standard number referenced and debated among law experts.

“You have nine justices and new justices added every Congress, every two years. Nine times two is 18,” he explained, saying the 18-year plan became more popular during the recent 11-year period that saw no justice turnover from 1994 to 2005.

Is there support for this kind of Supreme Court reform?

A NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist national poll from April shows 68% of Americans support term limits for Supreme Court justices. In fact, a majority of Republicans, Independents and Democrats who responded to the poll all agreed that there should be term limits.

Currently, Khanna’s bill is supported by mostly Democrats, like California Rep. Rep. Barbara Lee and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib. But term limits or some kind of Court reform have been a Republican talking point in the recent past, Roth said, citing essays written by Missouri Sen. Joshua Hawley and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. In 2016, then-Republican presidential candidates Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul also endorsed the idea.

“Fast-forward nine years and now it’s only Democrats talking about term limits,” said Roth. “It’s interesting how the issue has been sort of flipped on its head from a partisan perspective.

“(But) this is an apolitical reform. There is no partisan balance to an 18-year term. It would apply to future justices that are appointed by Democratic presidents and Republican presidents alike.”

“Currently the bill is Democrats only, but there’s no reason it can’t be a bipartisan effort,” Roth said.

A group of protesters hold signs reading "Cancel Student Debt Now" and "End Student Debt" — Supporters of student debt forgiveness demonstrate outside the US Supreme Court on June 30, 2023, in Washington, DC. The court dealt President Joe Biden a significant political setback when it overruled his key program to cancel the student debt of millions of Americans. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

What are the arguments against SCOTUS term limits?

In 2021, President Joe Biden formed a commission to discuss court reform. The commission was bipartisan and included former federal judges, practitioners and advocates. However, the commission did not have a consensus or recommendations for the court in its final report, according to The Wall Street Journal. Read the entire report here (PDF).

One of the commissioners, Adam White, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank The American Enterprise Institute, said in a statement that term limits were problematic “especially when they are intended to allocate appointments on the calendar of presidential terms” (PDF).

“By tying Supreme Court vacancies and appointments directly and exclusively to the outcomes of presidential elections, a term-limits framework would further corrode the appearance of judicial neutrality and independence, making the Court a spoil not just of politics, but of presidential politics exclusively,” he wrote.

Is there a chance of Ro Khanna’s SCOTUS reform proposal actually passing?

This is the third time Khanna has brought this bill to Congress, introducing it in 2020 and 2021. And experts, like Cody Harris, partner at San Francisco law firm Keker, Van Nest and Peters, find it hard to see a bill like this passing — at least right now, in 2023.

“We’re talking about the Constitution here. The Constitution can be amended,” Harris said at a recent town hall event focused on the Supreme Court, at Manny’s, a community space in San Francisco. “It’s been amended plenty of times and 27 times, and it could always be amended further: for good or ill.”

“It’s very hard to amend the Constitution,” said Harris — but, he added, it’s “not impossible. And if enough states, enough people in enough states want to change some of this stuff, they can.” (Skip to 1:27:30 in the above Facebook Watch video to see a panel of legal experts, including Harris, debate this issue.)

Roth agrees with that perspective, not expecting Ro Khanna’s bill to advance with a Republican-controlled House at this tie.

“Republicans have said that they don’t want to reform the court, which is (what I) think is a a historical view. There have been Republicans in the past who have wanted to reform the court,” Roth said.

“But I still think it’s an important marker to put down to say, ‘Look, we shouldn’t have nine individuals with this much power for this long.’”

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Supreme Court Reform: Would Ro Khanna's Term Limit Proposal Work?

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