Joe Manchin Might Be the Senate’s Least Serious Supreme Court Reformer
As everyone in Washington knows, the best time for a senator to unveil a constitutional amendment is right before you leave office for good.
For most of his tenure in the Senate, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin has been the Democratic caucus’s most annoying member, as likely to cast a key vote to, say, save the Affordable Care Act in 2017 as he is to publicly flirt with endorsing Trump in 2020. His obsession with moderation as an end in itself, which recently prompted him to formally reregister as an independent, is the product of a borderline-pathological need to situate himself at (whatever he personally perceives as) the country’s ideological center, without regard for whether the associated real-world policy position is bad, incoherent, or some combination thereof. The frequent subject of soft-focus profiles that frame him as the most enigmatic man in Washington, the driving force behind Manchin’s interest in any given issue is usually how much fawning media attention he believes he can derive from championing it.
Now, Manchin, who did not run for re-election in 2024, has figured out one last way to score a glowing headline before he bails to whichever lobbying firm offers him the most comfortable pay-to-hours ratio in January: along with Vermont Democrat Pete Welch, proposing a constitutional amendment to institute 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices, which has exactly zero chance of happening, may or may not be necessary to accomplish its goal, and functionally expires when lawmakers head home for the holidays next week. In light of the herculean effort associated with amending a Constitution that has not substantively changed since the Nixon administration sometime between now and Christmas, The Washington Post described the proposal as “ambitious” and a “long shot,” which is true in the same way that the Donner Party’s attempt to traverse the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846 was both “ambitious” and a “long shot.”
To the Post, Manchin explained that term limits are a necessary “shot of adrenaline” for a Court on which justices otherwise serve for decades, and says he plans to continue to push for term limits after he leaves office. (“This is not a progressive idea,” he clarified, because heaven forbid that his name ever be associated with anything that might be labeled as such.) Manchin went on to discuss the importance of constructing a Court that includes “people from different iterations of life” who “understand the culture.” As the old Washington saying goes, nothing says I am serious about restoring trust in a broken institution quite like slapping your name on a last-minute moonshot while most of your office is packed up in moving boxes.
Manchin is right to note that normal people support term limits by healthy margins—according to polling conducted earlier this year, 68 percent of all voters, 79 percent of Democrats, and 58 percent of Republicans. But Republican politicians have zero incentive to throw their support behind such reforms, no matter how popular or “common-sense” they may be. The Supreme Court is the GOP’s most important source of political power, and will probably remain so for a generation. For the next four years, Trump will have the chance to appoint replacements for any justices who die or retire, thus shoring up or even expanding his conservative supermajority. In context, for Republicans, preemptively capping Hypothetical Justice Aileen Cannon’s period of service would amount to unilateral disarmament. If term limits were really as bipartisan as Manchin imagines, perhaps he would have been able to find a single Republican willing to attach their name to it.
For Democrats, the problem with term limits is the same as it has always been: They are a necessary but not sufficient step toward rebalancing the most reactionary Court in a century. In light of the 2024 election, Democrats of course will not have the votes to expand the Court anytime soon, but they should at least be spending the next few years doing things that build popular support for reforms that would actually make a difference. A senator on the brink of political irrelevance pushing a half-measure term limits amendment that no Republican wants does not count.
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