Some past Supreme Court justices -- like James F. Byrnes, who was appointed in 1941 and left about a year later -- did not see the court as the pinnacle of their career and left for other pursuits that would define their legacy, the Associated Press reports. Today, Americans have become accustomed in recent decades to justices who retire only after decades on the bench, or like Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, who died while on the bench. Legislation pending in Congress would end life tenure on the Supreme Court, though there is little chance term limits will become law anytime soon even with the support of Vice President Kamala Harris, along with many others in her party and a majority of Americans.
Byrnes, appointed to the court by President Franklin Roosevelt, later sat on a small secret committee of government officials that recommended the use of the atomic bomb against Japan and served as Secretary of State before ending his long public career as governor of South Carolina, where he emerged as a segregationist critic of the court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended official segregation in public schools Like many justices until fairly recently, Byrnes came to the court from the political world. He had been a senator and member of Congress. “It used to be that a lot of justices were former elected officials who kind of always had, you know, a kind of hankering to get back to it. And of course, that doesn’t exist anymore,” said Stuart Banner, a UCLA legal historian and law professor. His new book, “The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States,″ will be published in November.
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