U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton

Just as the Court's decision in Thornton was split more or less between the liberals who opposed term limits and the conservatives who supported them, the reaction in political journals was on similar lines. Jeffrey Rosen in the liberal New Republic, writing before the Court reviewed the case, suggested that "The justices will be on solid ground if they strike down term limits on the theory that no temporary majority--in a federal or state legislature or state plebiscite--should be able to add qualifications for office that thwart the will of the voters in each district." As it turned out, this was close to what the majority decided. The conservative National Review, in a review of the case after the decision, praised Justice Thomas's "long, dispassionate, lucid, and thoroughly persuasive" dissenting opinion. Thomas' dissent, wrote Lino A. Graglia was "a call to revolution: for the Court not to invalidate policy choices on which the Constitution is silent would be for the Court hardly to invalidate any policy choices at all and to permit policy-making on basic social issues to revert to the control of the people." Even the radical Lenora Fulani, perennial candidate for the presidency, decried the Thornton ruling, calling it an "indicat[ion] to many Americans that the time has come to impose term limits on the Supreme Court, too." Yet the Republican Revolution of the 1994 elections, which brought about Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress for the first time since 1954, proved that sweeping change was possible without term limits. On 29 March 1995, the new House of Representatives voted on a term limits amendment. The initiative lost by a vote of 227 to 204.