A Case for Supreme Court Term Limits? The Changing Ideological Relationship between Appointing Presidents and Supreme Court Justices

The desirability of complete judicial independence has been debated in several recent works. At issue is whether democratic theory is compatible with policy making by the unelected U.S. Supreme Court justices, particularly as their service becomes further removed from the time when elected officials played a role in their appointment. We examine the relationship between appointing presidents and Supreme Court justices. Relying on ideal points that place all actors in the same scale, our regression models show that a justice will drift from the ideology of an appointing president with each additional term served, even after controlling for ideological shifts in political climate. The beginning of the eleventh term is when ideological drift becomes significant. The connection between justices and democratically elected officials begins to wane after this point in a justice's tenure—a finding that is likely to be germane for proponents of term limits for Supreme Court justices.