In an eyebrow-raising move, Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes recently suggested that Supreme Court justices should be subjected to term limits.
According to Breitbart, Barnes made the statement while participating in a televised debate on Friday night with Republican Sen. Ron Johnson (WI).
“There should not be lifetime appointments”
When the moderator asked Barnes what he would do to increase public confidence in the nation’s highest judicial body, he responded, “[I] support term limits for Supreme Court Justices.
“These should not be lifetime appointments,” Barnes emphatically said after Democrats tried to expand the court, to no avail,” the candidate continued.
For his part, Johnson argued that the reason why public confidence in the Court has declined is largely due to mischaracterizations by politically biased media.
“The reason people are complaining is because they are leftists themselves,” the conservative lawmaker said. “There is biased media. They don’t like it when you have a Supreme Court that has conservative justices who actually just apply the law rather than try to alter it.”
“So I’m utterly opposed to judicial activists, and that of course … that is what the liberal press likes – an activist court,” Johnson concluded.
Leftists outraged
The Supreme Court has come under renewed criticism from many members of the left in recent months following a series of controversial decisions.
The most prominent was Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the Court’s conservative majority found that the Constitution contains no right abortion.
That led to mass outrage, with mobs of protestors showing up outside the homes of conservative justices. In one incident, a California man was charged with attempted murder after he was arrested at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home with a firearm.
What’s more, Fox News reported in July that an aggressive mob appeared outside of a Washington D.C. restaurant that Kavanaugh was dining at and forced him to escape out of a backdoor.
That act of intimidation was praised by the left-wing group ShutDownDC, which tweeted, “We hear Kavanaugh snuck out the back with his security detail.”