The Supreme Court is a critical piece of the checks and balances system. They need to hold their positions for life because they should not be afraid of losing them due to the whims of the President, Congress, or even the voters. We want them to be outside of the political process once they've been appointed; that is a feature. If a justice is corrupt or incompetent, there are processes to remove them from the bench. The ironic part is that if that doesn't happen, it'll be because the people charged with doing it are so mired in politics that they can't, or won't.
Agreed, which is why there are processes to remove them. My point is that those processes fail because the people charged with undertaking them are political. So, more politics is not, in my mind, the solution.
I can agree that there should be as much insulation from the political process as possible but I believe lifetime appointments actually increase the politicization of the institution. There have been interesting proposals around, e.g. 18 year terms staggered in such a way that there is a new vacancy every two years or so. This has the advantage of limiting the damage a corrupt justice can do even in the event that a a corrupt appointment is made. The current system with lifetime appointments made _through_ an extremely political process with no accountability for sitting justices is awful and already looks like it may be the downfall of the institution. I am as disgusted by our politics is anyone but I am genuinely curious how we could possibly have reform and accountability for the institution without political action.
This is about how it works in Mexico (15 year terms). The 18 years might be needed to avoid a court majority from two four year presidential terms, although I'd say adopting the single six year presidential term would be a good change as well.
