Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says that while he doesn’t think much about the Biden-Harris administration’s proposal to reform the U.S. Supreme Court by imposing term limits of 18 years, he’d gladly accept that if Congress would also mandate term limits for itself.
“If they’re willing to support term limits for members of Congress, that would be a trade that I would make,” he told reporters during a news conference in Tampa on Monday.
The Phoenix followed up by asking the governor whether he could support Congress imposing a mandatory age requirement for Supreme Court justices, as is the law in Florida. A 2018 constitutional amendment approved by voters in Florida in 2018 now requires state justices to retire on their 75th birthday. Before then, they were required to retire by the time their 70th birthday arrived.
“If you’re going to do it, do it for everybody in office,” he said. “If you want to do it to 75, just don’t apply it to justices, apply it to Congress. Apply it to the executive. If you’re going to do it, that would be one thing.”
While Democrats talked about Supreme Court reform before the 2020 election, the push to make some changes has only intensified in recent years, following the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned a woman’s federal right to an abortion, and the decision this year that the presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within their exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.
The court also ruled that not all of the president’s official acts fall within his “conclusive and preclusive” authority.
DeSantis said he understands that Democrats are unhappy with makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court, comprising six conservative justices and just three liberal members. But he warned that changes could redound upon them in the future.
“You think you’re doing it because you think that it will help generate more liberal jurisprudence and, in reality, a lot of times it backfires. It may end up if you had 18 years, that it would force liberals off the bench, and then maybe a Republican would be able to replace, so you just don’t know how that’s going to shake out.”
That’s what happened when DeSantis took office in Tallahassee in 2019, as three moderate-to-liberal justices entered forced retirement. DeSantis named movement conservatives to replace them and went on to create a 6-1 conservative majority.
‘Court-packing’
During the 2019-2020 Democratic campaign for president, some candidates pushed for expanding the number of justices a president could appoint to the court — an action known as “court packing” that Joe Biden has consistently opposed. Just a little over a year ago, the president told MSNBC, “If we start the process of trying to expand the court, we’re going to politicize it maybe forever in a way that is not healthy.”
DeSantis referred to the size of the national debt, now at an all-time $35 trillion, as the reason he wants term limits for members of Congress.
“That is a failure of leadership, and I think it’s because in part those folks get there and the main thing they try to do is stay there as long as possible, instead of saying that you have a limited amount of time to make a difference, lead, get things done, then go back and live under the rules.”
Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to the state Constitution in 1992 imposing term limits on the Florida Legislature, Cabinet, and lieutenant governor (the measure also included term limits for Florida members of Congress, but the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated that provision in 1995).
Those term limits of eight years for members of both legislative chambers have been criticized over the years by editorial boards like the Orlando Sentinel‘s, which wrote in December that they had “stripped” the Legislature by “reducing competitive elections and making staffers and lobbyists more powerful.”
The Florida Legislature this year passed resolutions calling on Congress to convene a constitutional convention to propose term-limit and balanced-budget amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
The governor also weighed in on the controversy following Friday’s opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Paris, which involved a scene that many people took to resemble Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” featuring drag queens and other performers in a configuration reminiscent of Jesus Christ and his apostles.
French organizers indicated they meant to depict a bacchanal featuring Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, pleasure, madness, and frenzy.
“I was just sad seeing this,” DeSantis declared. “It’s like that was a symbol of the decline of Western civilization. I don’t think on the closing ceremonies they’re going to do anything to mock Islam. I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
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