WASHINGTON (AP) — In the summer of 1941, James F. Byrnes became a Supreme Court justice. A little more than a year later, he had enough and left the court to take a key role in planning the nation’s war economy.
Americans have become accustomed in recent decades to justices who retire only after decades in office, or to justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia who died while in office. Ginsburg and Scalia are among nearly half of the 116 justices who died while in office or within months of their retirement.
A bill pending in Congress would end lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court, though there is little chance term limits will become law any time soon, even with the support of Vice President Kamala Harris, many others in her party and a majority of Americans. But those like Byrnes who did not see the court as the pinnacle of their careers and moved on to other jobs that would shape their legacies offer a glimpse of what justices might do if they could not spend the rest of their lives on the highest court in the land.
Byrnes was appointed to the bench by President Franklin Roosevelt and later served on a diminutive secret committee of government officials that recommended the utilize of the atomic bomb against Japan. He also served as Secretary of State before ending his long public career as governor of South Carolina, where he emerged as a segregation critic of the court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended official racial segregation in public schools.
Like many judges until recently, Byrnes came to the court from politics. He was a senator and congressman.
“In the past, many justices were former elected officials who had a perpetual desire to return to office. And of course, that no longer exists,” said Stuart Banner, a legal historian and law professor at UCLA. His up-to-date book, “The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States,” will be published in November.
Sandra Day O’Connor was the last justice to hold elected office, as a senator from Arizona. On the current court, every justice except Elena Kagan was a federal appellate judge. Kagan was the Obama administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer before taking the office.
A key reason for the recent favoritism toward appellate judges is the higher stakes associated with lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court. The written opinions of lower courts are considered a reliable indicator of how someone would vote on the Supreme Court.
But the line between politics and justice was not always so clear. Chief Justice Earl Warren had been governor of California before coming to Washington. The first Chief Justice, John Jay, resigned to become governor of New York.
Whether term limits would mean a return of judges with more extensive experience in public life is controversial.
But judges appointed for life may “lose their understanding of the broader public sentiments of the country,” says Cliff Sloan, who worked on Supreme Court nominations in the Clinton administration and helped vet potential nominees for President Barack Obama.
“Term limits would ensure some degree of controlled turnover on the court, which would be helpful in bringing diverse perspectives to the court,” said Sloan, who wrote about the court in his 2023 book, “The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made.”
Among the nine men who were judges when the United States entered World War II were former members of Congress, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and a former attorney general.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Byrnes and other judges felt left out when they would have much preferred to be in the stout of things.
Two days after Pearl Harbor, the court heard arguments in a case involving ships built 25 years earlier, during World War I, Banner writes in his book. The case “seemed of little importance in light of the news broadcasts still coming in from Pearl Harbor,” Banner quotes Byrne’s later recollections.
And Byrnes was not alone, Sloan said. At least five justices “made it clear to FDR that they would be happy to leave the court and take on war-related duties,” he said.
One of those justices was William O. Douglas, the former chairman of the SEC. Douglas served longer than any other justice, more than 36 years. But he could have left the court after just five years.
In 1944, Douglas almost became Roosevelt’s vice presidential candidate. Instead, Harry Truman was chosen, who became president the following year after Roosevelt’s death.
Douglas stayed on the court even as his candidacy was openly discussed. He only had to look back a few decades to be guided by this.
Charles Evans Hughes, a former governor of New York, did not leave the court until 1916 after winning the Republican nomination for president.
On election night in November, he reportedly went to bed believing he had won the presidency. But he fell less than 4,000 votes miniature in California, and President Woodrow Wilson was reelected.
Hughes’ public service was far from over. He eventually became Secretary of State and returned to the Supreme Court as Chief Justice in 1930. He was the first Chief Justice to preside over the Court when its up-to-date building opened in 1935.
