But we have that now. The idea of setting a term limit for Supreme Court justices is that it would minimize the effect of politicized appointments. Assuming the party that gets to make the appointments shifts over time, the makeup of the court is likely to be more balanced overall.

The proposal more often floated around is an 18-year term limit (see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=701121 ), which would give each president 2 appointments.

The big difficult, however, is how to make sure that a hostile senate wouldn't just block all nominations (which is the new norm). Some people like Calabresi have suggested that the president and everyone in the senate would be denied all compensation (IIRC even from private parties) until the seat is filled. I don't think that's a workable idea though.

6 years is awfully short for this sort of thing. What we absolutely need to avoid is having justices have to care about reelection, which means we need to say justices can only ever serve one term, which means we need longer terms.

> 6 year staggered appointments. So 3 justices terms are up every 2 years. Means one president doesn't get to completely stack the court

Most presidents are reelected to two terms, and so if judicial terms were offset from Presidential terms by a year, they'd have:

At 0 years, 0 justices they appointed.

At 1 year, 3 justices.

At 3 years, 6 justices.

At 5-8 years (and up until 1 year into the next term), all 9 justices.

So most President get to completely stack the court, the effects just don't last as long—the judiciary becomes another weathervane political branch of government, because the two of those was too few.

(And I don't even want to consider the consequences of all those short time justices looking to their post-Court career while sitting on the bench.)

> 6 year staggered appointments. So 3 justices terms are up every 2 years. Means one president doesn't get to completely stack the court, but each has a fair impact on it, and we aren't stuck with judges with outdated ideologies forever (unless people vote for it).

That's how the Senate used to work, with state legislatures "electing" the senators.

That was replaced a hundred years ago with direct election of senators.