Eighteen-Year Staggered Terms. A Permanent Nine-Seat Cap.
A seat on the Supreme Court is the most powerful un-elected job in America—and right now it's a lifetime appointment with no limit. So the timing of a single death or a strategic retirement can reshape the country for a generation, confirmation fights have become scorched-earth wars, and Justices increasingly time their exits to hand the seat to "their side." None of that is healthy, and none of it is what the Founders imagined.
The fix is eighteen-year staggered terms, with a permanent nine-seat cap. We've drafted it to be fair to everyone—and, framed right, it lowers the temperature around the Court instead of raising it. This is one of the constitutional amendments we're publishing on its own, so you can take up whichever matters most to you.
Here's the elegant part. With nine seats, an eighteen-year term produces exactly one vacancy every two years. That means every President gets the same two appointments per term—no more windfalls, no more droughts, no more outcomes hinging on when a Justice happens to die. The Court comes to reflect a generation of elections instead of luck, and the stakes of any single confirmation drop dramatically, which takes the poison out of the process. (Twenty years, which we first considered, leaves the staggering uneven—so we moved to eighteen, the number that makes the whole machine run smoothly.)
Here's a fact that surprises most people: the Constitution never sets the size of the Supreme Court. The number nine comes from an ordinary statute—the Judiciary Act—so Congress can change it with a simple majority whenever one party controls Washington. That statute is the loaded gun behind every court-packing threat, from Franklin Roosevelt's 1937 plan to add up to six Justices to the proposals both parties have floated in recent years. A law can be packed. This amendment writes the number nine into the Constitution itself, where a bare majority can never reach it again.
And it does more than forbid packing—it removes the reason anyone wants to. Court-packing is powered by a single fear: being locked out of the Court for a generation by luck and timing. When every President is guaranteed the same two appointments every term, that fear evaporates. No side is ever shut out, so no side needs to blow up the Court to claw its way back in.
The trickiest question is what to do about the Justices already serving—some well past eighteen years. We answer it three ways, and we're upfront that this is the piece most likely to be negotiated:
We deliberately chose not to offer any special financial incentive for long-serving Justices to retire early—paying Justices to quit would look unseemly and raise ethics questions, and forcing them out would break the grandfather promise. We don't need to: senior status already gives any departing Justice a dignified, full-salary landing, and under existing law the longest-serving Justices already qualify to retire at full pay today. Time and a graceful exit do the work.
This isn't a knock on any individual Justice. It's a simple truth about power and human nature: almost anyone, in almost any role, is ready for a change after eighteen years—and so is everyone around them. We already accept this everywhere else that matters:
Several current Justices have already served past eighteen years, and a couple approach thirty-five. The point was never that a Justice declines—it's that no single person should hold that much unaccountable power for thirty or forty years, and that a healthy democracy refreshes even its most respected institutions every generation.
This is a discussion draft prepared for review by legislative counsel and for presentation to Members of Congress—proposed constitutional text, not final legislative language. The wording will keep tightening as it moves forward.
Read the full text, share it, and—most importantly—send it to your Representative. All three are formatted Word documents you can print or attach to an email.
An amendment has to be proposed by Congress before any state can ratify it, so the people to contact are your U.S. Representative and your two U.S. Senators. Not sure who they are?
A short, specific message from a constituent carries real weight—far more than a mass-produced form letter. Personal calls to a district office count even more.
Here's a letter you can use as a starting point. Make it your own—add a sentence about why the lifetime-appointment wars bother you. Fill in the bracketed pieces, then paste it into your Representative's contact form or print and mail it.
Consider attaching the one-page summary or the full text (above) so your Representative's office has the actual language in hand.
The 2021 Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court found that term limits are the reform with, in its words, the most widespread and bipartisan support of any it studied. Versions have been introduced in both the House and Senate, and the public consistently backs the idea across party lines.