A Balanced Bench

A "Balanced Bench." idea. This proposal aims to counteract the effects of partisanship on the Court by explicitly recognizing and institutionalizing partisanship presence. The Court would have ten justices, with five seats allocated to each of the two major parties. Those ten justices would select sets of five additional justices at a time to serve a future, non-renewable one-year term. That selection would operate on a requirement of near-unanimity to ensure that this final set of five justices would be relatively even-handed. However, it is not certain how a Democratic president would fill a vacancy in a Republican seat that arose during her tenure, or how a Republican president would fill an analogous Democratic vacancy.