Mike Ledbetter, DFW native and resident, believes easing the turmoil and division plaguing America is partly as simple as applying term limits to the U.S. Supreme Court.
He’s campaigning to be elected the 47th President of the United States in 2024 in order to make his vision a reality.
The 56-year-old presidential hopeful attended the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University in Houston and graduated from the University of Houston Law Center. Although Ledbetter has a law degree, he doesn’t practice law.
Instead, he used the experience to write his book Nine Sovereign Kings: The Return of God, which details his presidential plan to create accountability for U.S. Supreme Court judges.
“The U.S. Supreme Court is the most unaccountable government branch in our body of government that’s ever been in existence,” Ledbetter said. “There is not a single check and balance on them whatsoever, and it’s very dangerous.”
The Texas native is proposing limiting each life-tenured U.S. Supreme Court justice to 4-year terms that parallel the U.S. President’s term, with the possibility of being eligible to serve three terms, for a maximum of 12 years.
“At the end of every four years, each justice will come before the people for a retention election where each justice will be either removed or confirmed by the People at that time,” Ledbetter told The Dallas Express. “Those Justices who are confirmed by the People will be granted another 4-year term.”
While Ledbetter, who is registered with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as an independent, proposes maintaining the current protocol that the President appoints Supreme Court justices and the U.S. Senate confirms them, he wants the people to have a voice in the process.
“On the ballot, when the people are voting for president, the names of the nine Supreme Court Justice should be listed and the voters would then be able to circle ‘retain’ or ‘remove’ from office, depending on how they ruled on cases,” Ledbetter said in an interview.
However, at least one constitutional expert argues that implementing term limits on U.S. Supreme Court justices is complicated.
“One legal question is whether it would require a constitutional amendment to impose term limits, whatever the length,” said Professor Jonathan Entin, who teaches constitutional law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
“It might be possible to get around the constitutional problem by having Congress enact a law that allows a federal judge during good behavior to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court for only a certain number of years, and after that they would go to some other court, but it would require that Congress approve the legislation,” Entin continued.
That’s because Article 3 Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution directs U.S. Supreme Court justices to serve ‘during good behavior,’ which has been interpreted as meaning ‘for life,’ according to Entin, who formerly clerked for the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“If you look at states that elect their Supreme Court, many of them have seen a huge escalation in the level of rhetoric and the amount of special interest money that goes into these elections, and if that were to happen with the U.S. Supreme Court, which is the highest court in the land, that could aggravate a lot of those trends,” he said.
Ledbetter says, historically, the U.S. Supreme Court has acted in the best interest of its members while presiding over cases, rather than the best interest of the People.
“It was the U.S. Supreme Court that ignited the Civil War by some of their decisions, like in the Dred Scott case,” he said. “They were supporting child labor because they were making money and it was Congress that had to keep fighting and get things in place to protect young children that were being exploited in our nation.”
In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Black people who were descendants of American slaves were not citizens of the United States.
“They are the last and final word on our Constitution and that was a mistake in the experiment of democracy, because you never want to have a body that’s unaccountable in every single way to be the last and final word over every law in the United States,” he said. “This was the only oversight made by our founding fathers.”
Though Ledbetter wants to deviate from the Supreme Court as prescribed by the founding fathers, he wants to restore the approach they took in another matter.
If elected, the former U.S. Army tank commander said he would follow in the footsteps of the first U.S. President, George Washington, who led troops on the ground during wartime.
“I’ll even do that,” Ledbetter added. “I’m not going to be a president who will send our troops to die while sitting in an office.”
Although honorable, Entin said the way in which war is waged today differs significantly from that of George Washington’s presidency.
“The reason George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Ulysses Grant were on the ground with their troops and Dwight Eisenhower, for example, was not, has to do with the fact that the nature of warfare has changed,” Entin told The Dallas Express.
