Justice Stephen Breyer rebuffed a proposal to add more seats to the Supreme Court, saying instead that nine members “seems to work.”
“I think nine is fine,” Breyer said during an event Monday when he was asked about the “Pack the Court” proposal favored by many leading Democrats. “I’m not speaking about anybody’s proposal, but I’ve discovered that nine seems to work.”
Breyer, 80, noted that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the state’s highest appellate court, has seven members, which he called a “better number.”
“Seven is fine. Eight is fine. Nine is fine,” he said. “And it’s hard, you know, because these are not shrinking violets, any of the members of the court, and yet they are going to be helpful really when they produce opinions which have … five or more members signing on to those opinions because basically the country is not — maybe a few reporters are — but the country is not interested primarily in what Sandra [Day] O’Connor or what I or David [Souter] or somebody else think of the Constitution. They want to know primarily what does the court think.”
A number of Democrats vying to unseat President Trump in 2020 have embraced the idea of expanding the Supreme Court, which currently has nine members, as retribution for Republicans blocking President Barack Obama’s judicial picks, including his nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland.
Garland, a judge on the federal appeals court in the District of Columbia, was selected to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the high court following his death in 2016, but Republicans left the seat unfilled for more than 400 days until the Senate confirmed Trump’s nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch.
The idea of adding seats to the Supreme Court has picked up steam following the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in October, which solidified a 5-4 conservative majority on the high court.
Kavanaugh’s confirmation, as well as the efforts by the president and the GOP-controlled Senate to name young, conservative judges to the federal bench, has also revived the debate about whether there should be term limits for Supreme Court justices.
Breyer, a member of the court’s liberal wing, said he would not be opposed to implementing term limits for members of the high court but stressed that he was not referencing any particular proposal or presidential candidate.
“I think it would be fine to have long terms, say 18 years or something like that for a Supreme Court justice,” he said. “It would make life easier. I wouldn’t have to worry about when I’m going to have to retire or not, and that would be easier for me.”
Breyer said any limit to the number of years a justice can serve would have to be high to prevent a justice from job-hunting while serving on the bench.
Justices typically follow a tradition of retiring under a president of the same political party as the president who nominated them.
Breyer, 80, was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton and confirmed in 1994.
