Democrat Mandela Barnes said at Friday night’s debate with Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson that he wants to politicize the Supreme Court by instituting term limits.
The moderator asked Barnes what he would do to increase public confidence in the Court.
“[I] support term limits for Supreme Court Justices. These should not be lifetime appointments,” Barnes emphatically said after Democrats tried to expand the court, to no avail.
Johnson answered the same question by placing blame on the media for misconstruing legal arguments.
“The reason people are complaining is because they are leftists themselves. There is biased media,” he said. “They don’t like it when you have a Supreme Court that has conservative justices who actually just apply the law rather than try to alter it.”
“So I’m utterly opposed to judicial activists, and that of course … that is what the liberal press likes – an activist court,” Johnson said.
Recent polling shows Johnson leading in the polls by five points. Just two months ago, Barnes was leading Johnson by a moderate margin. But Barnes’s radical record seems to be working against him.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.