Huckabee Calls for Term Limits on Supreme Court

Sunday on on CNN’s “State of the Union,” former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR), a candidate for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, said we need to amend the Constitution and imposes term limits on Supreme Court justices, who now serve lifetime appointments.

In discussing his disappointment in the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage, Huckabee said, “Well, even the supporters of same-sex marriage should be very concerned that as justice Scalia, I think, very brilliantly wrote, what you now have is that our country is being ruled by a majority of nine lawyers who are not representative of the population as a whole. That’s very disturbing. And if people say well I love that ruling, great. So one day when we have a conservative court, and let’s hope we do. I guarantee you in a Huckabee administration there will be very different kind of people appointed to the court, let’s say that the court reverses this decision, and in fact goes back and reverses Roe v. Wade and says that every person from conception forward should be treated with dignity, respect, and protected. Now, will the left who celebrate this court decision be just as willing to accept that court decision? My guess is they will absolutely blow a gasket. We have a process, if we want to change things, and it’s called the process of legislation, the art of political persuasion. All of that was thrown out of the window. So for even those who think that the result was good, I hope they would agree that the means by which it was achieved is absolutely unacceptable.”

“Let’s say if we made it 16 years, even 20 years, I don’t have a specific arbitrary goal in mind. I just think that people, whether they’re in the executive branch, legislative, or judicial branch, shouldn’t see their appointment to a office as that it would be that they have permanent, no accountability whatsoever, and I also think when a person can be appointed to the Supreme Court and stay there for 40 years, my gosh, they might have outlived, you know, six or seven presidents during that course of time. I’m just not sure that that’s a healthy thing. By the way, Thomas Jefferson wanted there to be term limits for members of the Supreme Court, pushed for it. But the consensus was, nobody will stay that long. It’s not necessary to put it in the Constitution. I think if Jefferson were here today, he’d have said i wish he’d have pushed harder,” he added.