It's time to start pushing for a constitutional amendment...

[Ocelot II]

4. The original reason for appointing judges for lifetime terms was

so they wouldn't be too influenced by short-term political trends. Well, we saw how that turned out. The Court has always been influenced by politics, but in recent times, at least, it's never been so blatantly partisan as it is now. In my state, and probably some others, judges are initially appointed by the governor but after that they have to run for re-election every six years, without party affiliation. M. This method allows governors to appoint ideologically-sympathetic judges, but if those judges turn out to be bad in some way they can be voted out. Most of the time they run unopposed; lately there have been some regular extreme RW candidates but they always lose. This system seems to work pretty well - we haven't had any really horrible judges on the appellate courts.