1. United States
2. Maine
3. Letter

Please support reform of the Supreme Court. For now, please take up all proposals for reform that come before you-- including Rep Olszewski's ROBE amendment which sets out a scheme for term limits. In the long run, to regain its legitimacy, the Supreme Court needs to be rebalanced and reconfigured with an ethics code, term limits, and an expanded bench so that the number of justices corresponds to the expansion of the US and the new workload of the court. The current bench includes justices who lied at their confirmation hearings, some justices' records include known and alleged instances of sexual misconduct; some justices have accepted but not declared gifts that make their neutrality questionable; some justices spouses have financial and institutional connections that undermine neutrality and objectivity. These facts in tandem with blatant partisanship and the misuse of the shadow docket have tarnished the credibility of Scotus beyond repair. As we see daily, the lapses in ethical practice of scotus justices are currently beyond oversight, outside accountability and would not be tolerated in lower courts. The current justices have destroyed the credibility and moral standing of their court by bad faith reasoning, using false evidence, and imposing "principles" such as the "Purcell principle" inconsistently and capriciously. Scotus needs to know that the writing is on the wall. For now, I ask you to support term limit legislation of Rep. Johnny Olszewski, D-Md.. His proposed constitutional amendment would impose 18-year term limits on Supreme Court justices. Olszewski's proposal (the Reform of Bench Eligibility Act, or ROBE Act) would replace the current system of lifetime appointments with regular, predictable turnover at SCOTUS. According to Olszewski's office, the amendment would apply to current justices; it includes a transition process to move the Court into the new system. Term limits alone will not fix a rogue activist SCOTUS that has broken down the separation of powers, usurping legislative power and intervening to give the executive & large corporations legal impunity that the framers did not intend. But they are a necessary start.