When our country was born, life expectancy was in the mid to high 50s. Therefore, making a Supreme Court nomination a lifetime appointment didn’t appear to be an extreme idea. Obviously today, life expectancies are much higher than they were over 200 years ago.

Every time there’s a Supreme Court Justice nomination, the nation must endure a long, drawn out battle in the Senate. Why must we go through this agony? It’s time to update the Constitution and make the nomination a onetime 10-year term. If someone wants to add a couple of years to that number, I would be OK with that. I’m confident that change would make the nominations proceed more quickly and without so much conflict. No, it won’t go smoothly, but it should help dramatically scale back the level of antagonism between the parties.

If we had one ten-year term, a legal genius named Clarence Thomas would have been off the Supreme Court 15 years ago, and from a legal perspective, the country would be much better off . Instead of 25 long years of silence on the court, we would have only had to endure 10.

I believe in order to make this change, we would need an amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would be quite an arduous task. I think it would be worth it.