Whatever price elected Republicans eventually pay for standing by President Donald J. Trump — and every party eventually pays at least some price for holding the White House — one could argue that Republicans have already gotten enough from Trump to justify backing him. In his always-interesting quarterly report, GOP lobbyist Bruce Mehlman has compiled some of the ways Trump has kept the Republican coalition together.

The biggest prizes for the right may be Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and potential Supreme Court Justice-To-Be Brett Kavanaugh. Assuming Kavanaugh’s confirmation, he and Gorsuch could be on the court for decades thanks to lifetime appointments. Anguish from the left over these appointments may lead to further escalations of the judicial wars in coming years, such as a future Senate majority mimicking and extending Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) successful 2016 gambit to not even hold a hearing on a nominee from a president of the other party, or a future president and Congress attempting to alter the size of the court for partisan gain.

Whatever happens, this much is clear: Lifetime federal court appointments are among the most valuable of partisan political spoils, and they are only increasing in value.

But does it have to be this way? Is there a way to de-escalate the judicial wars?

One possibility might be judicial term limits.

As part of a recent poll on money in politics conducted by Ipsos in conjunction with the Center for Politics (details on that previously released poll are here), we asked Americans what they thought about judicial term limits. More than two-thirds of respondents (70%) said they supported the idea. The details are in Table 1.

Table 1: Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? “Supreme Court Justices should have term limits.”

Source: Ipsos/UVA Center for Politics national poll of American adults, conducted July 5-6, 2018.

Reuters/Ipsos found similar levels of support for a Supreme Court term limit of 10 years in a 2015 poll. Back then, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling mandating same-sex marriage in all 50 states, Republicans were a bit more supportive of Supreme Court term limits than Democrats. Now, after the Kavanaugh nomination has increased the odds of a durable conservative court majority, Democrats are a little bit more inclined than Republicans to back SCOTUS term limits. As is often the case in politics, where you stand is based at least in part on where you sit.

That said, Americans typically support the idea of term limits, for judges or otherwise. For instance, term limits for Congress routinely attract levels of support as high or higher than what our poll with Ipsos found in support of judicial term limits. Currently 15 states have term limits for state legislators, most of which were implemented in the early 1990s as part of a national movement. Many states also tried to apply term limits to Congress, but the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against congressional term limits in 1995, arguing that term limits could not be applied to Congress without a constitutional amendment.

Judicial term limits face a similar constitutional hurdle, and amending the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress and support from three-quarters of the states. So are judicial term limits likely even though they are popular? No. But in a time of horrific partisan rancor and growing government dysfunction and partisanship, the American political imagination should open itself to at least considering seemingly drastic reforms.

In his 2007 book A More Perfect Constitution, Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato considered a slew of ways to change the United States’ guiding document. One of the proposals he considered was judicial term limits: specifically, a 15-year lifetime term for Supreme Court justices. What follows is a condensed and edited excerpt of the section of A More Perfect Constitution laying out his argument: