Ted Cruz Is Right to Call for Retention Elections for the Supreme Court
Andrew C. McCarthy – National Review
Within the space of just 48 hours, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the president is above the law; that straightforward statutory words may be twisted to mean the opposite of what they say … and that five politically unaccountable lawyers, by dint of being issued robes, may impose their vision of the good society on 320 million Americans…Like millions of Americans, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) thought this was a disastrous couple of days for the country. So did the rest of the Trumped-up cavalcade of GOP presidential hopefuls…. Cruz, however, undertook to do something about it. He proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would subject the justices to retention elections….Our would-be overlords would be required to account to us if they wanted to continue ruling us. Here at National Review last week, the senator outlined his proposal: The justices would face the voters every eight years, earning retention only if they are approved by a popular national majority plus majorities in at least half of the states.
Carlos McKnight waves a flag in support of gay marriage outside the Supreme Court in Washington on June 26, 2015. (AP)
Ted Cruz Is Right: The Supreme Court Needs Term Limits
Erwin Chemerinsky – New Republic
Although Senator Cruz has the right intention, his proposed solution would endanger the independence of the Court, rather than bolster it. Judicial elections at the state and local level have consistently led to justices inappropriately considering electoral pressures in making decisions, often to the detriment of individual rights—so imagine the reverberations of judicial elections on a national scale.
However, there is a reform that truly deserves thoughtful consideration: term limits for Supreme Court justices. In a year in which both liberals and conservatives have had plenty of decisions to cheer for and to criticize, term limits appropriately does not favor either political party or any ideology and has strong bipartisan support.
There are many ways to accomplish term limits, but the best idea is that each justice should be appointed for an 18-year, non-renewable term, thus creating a vacancy every two years.
Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks at the Georgia Republican Convention on May 15, 2015. (AP)
Some GOP Candidates Are Becoming Unhinged
George F. Will – The Washington Post
In 1824 … James Madison, 73, noted that the 1787 “language of our Constitution is already undergoing interpretations unknown to its founders.” …
Now, 147 years since ratification of the 14th Amendment, its guarantees of “equal protection of the laws” and “due process of law” mean that states, which hitherto controlled marriage law, must recognize same-sex marriages.
Many conservatives detect in those five words a dismaying intimation of a “living Constitution” too malleable to limit government because it conforms to whatever shape serves transitory political and cultural impulses…. Ted Cruz also endorses “judicial retention elections” ….
It is, therefore, especially disheartening that Cruz, who clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist … proposes curing what he considers this court’s political behavior by turning the court into a third political branch…. Sixteen months before the election, some candidates are becoming too unhinged to be plausible as conservative presidents.