Democrats in the House of Representatives, in an unprecedented move to stymie the constitutional requirement of life tenure for federal judges, are moving to send justices of the Supreme Court to an early retirement.

The Supreme Court Tenure Establishment and Retirement Modernization Act aims, in the words of one of its exclusively Democratic sponsors, to “fundamentally reframe the power of our nation’s highest court.” Senator Whitehouse has introduced the bill in the upper chamber. 

The legislation would authorize the president to nominate justices every two years, and would establish 18-year term limits on any future justice. After that tenure, justices would be eligible to sit on lower courts. Current justices would be gradually phased into senior status.

This proposal has circulated in past years, and now has gained new life in a moment of conflict — over guns and abortion, among other things — between the Article I and Article III branches. It would likely face a constitutional challenge that could end up being decided by the Supreme Court it seems to circumscribe.

Representative Hank Johnson, who introduced the bill, opines that the high court “is increasingly facing a legitimacy crisis” as the justices race “to impose their out-of-touch agenda on the American people.” Another sponsor, Representative Jerrold Nadler, laments “all the harmful and out-of-touch rulings from the Supreme Court this last year.”  

Relying on Congress’s power to regulate the high court under Article III Section 2 of the Constitution, the legislation is another instance of the House moving in response to a series of rulings punctuated by Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health, which overruled Roe v. Wade and abolished the finding of an earlier court that the Constitution contained a right to abortion.

This effort to constrain how long justices sit joins a call, issued last month, which sought to expand how many of them hear cases. Democrats are seeking to add four seats, to swell the number of justices on the Supreme Court to 13. Mr. Johnson, who is leading that push as well, labels it medicine for “​​a Supreme Court at crisis with itself and with our democracy.”

Fix the Court, a nonpartisan group that aims to render the federal judiciary more “open and more accountable,” tells the Sun that “a single, standard 18-year term at the high court would restore limits to the most powerful, least accountable branch of American government.”

The Constitution mandates that “The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour,” but is mum on the length of their tenure. Congress passed the Retirement Act of 1937 in the wake of President Roosevelt’s effort to pack the court, which allowed retiring justices to take senior status and hear cases on lower appellate courts. Eleven have done so, thus far.

These efforts to reform the court itself are proceeding even as the House attempts to checkmate the Nine via national legislation, with bills passed in recent days to guarantee a right to gay marriage, contraception, and access to abortion. While working to expand those rights, the House is also fermenting on the idea of curbing Second Amendment rights.