A Case for Supreme Court Term Limits? The Changing Ideological Relationship between Appointing Presidents and Supreme Court Justices

Abstract

The desirability of complete judicial independence has been debated in several recent works. At issue is whether democratic theory is compatible with policy making by the unelected U.S. Supreme Court justices, particularly as their service becomes further removed from the time when elected officials played a role in their appointment. We examine the relationship between appointing presidents and Supreme Court justices. Relying on ideal points that place all actors in the same scale, our regression models show that a justice will drift from the ideology of an appointing president with each additional term served, even after controlling for ideological shifts in political climate. The beginning of the eleventh term is when ideological drift becomes significant. The connection between justices and democratically elected officials begins to wane after this point in a justice's tenure-a finding that is likely to be germane for proponents of term limits for Supreme Court justices.

Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions

“…In other words, with greater experience on the bench, Republican-appointed and Democratic-appointed judges become more similar in their sentencing patterns. These results suggest that judges may learn with experience (see Epstein et al 1998;Kaheny, Haire, and Benesh 2008), potentially from their peers, and/or that the impact of the political affiliation of the appointing president may dissipate over time, perhaps because any "loyalty" effect diminishes when the appointing president is no longer in office (Sharma andGlennon 2013, Epstein andPosner 2016).…”

Diffuse Support, Partisanship, and the Electoral Relevance of the Supreme Court

“…In particular, proposals for term limits, which set the duration of how long justices may serve, have been debated since the founding (Giles, Blackstone, and Vinning 2008). In theory, these limits brake the ideological drift between a justice's ideological moorings and those of their appointing president that occurs as time transpires (Sharma and Glennon 2013), while decreasing slippage between views of law and public policy that occurs between the mass public and the judiciary. In addition, they can further alter the authority of the Court more generally by making it more responsive to political demands (Bartels and Johnston 2020).…”

Supreme Court Justicess Loyalty to the President

“…Scholars have identified a freshman effect (also called an acclimation effect) characterized by differences in ideological voting in the early years of a justice's tenure compared with later years (Hagle 1993). They have also found ideological drift: justices' ideologies, as reflected in their voting behavior, often change over time (Epstein et al 2007;Sharma and Glennon 2013). And a few papers have looked into our topic: whether justices are more favorable to the government while the appointing president is in office than later in the justices' tenure.…”