Comments and decisions are often made about what is essential, valuable, or desirable for the functioning of our national government without reference to important laboratories—our state governments. The states are structured much like the federal government with three branches of government, but there are often significant differences between state and federal operations. Those distinctions can shed light on the merits of federal structures.

For example, in this presidential season we can expect comments about the usefulness of the electoral college with assertions that it is essential to our freedoms. Such discussions should consider the states. None of them has adopted anything like an electoral college. Instead, all choose their governors by the direct vote of the electorate.

Another example: The United States Supreme Court bestowed presidents with immunity from criminal prosecutions. The decision rests on assertions that such immunity is necessary so that presidents can properly carry out their executive functions. The opinions do not mention that many governors throughout our history have been criminally prosecuted. The Court did not discuss how, if at all, such prosecutions influenced the effective functioning of state governments.

But what has most recently triggered my thinking about state governments is President Biden’s proposal to enact term limits for Supreme Court justices. According to news reports, Biden is proposing that each president will be able to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court every two years. After eighteen years of service, a justice would go on “senior” status and hear a case only if one of the nine active justices could not sit on it for some reason.

I can’t imagine that Biden’s proposal has a snowball’s chance of being enacted, but it has still produced an outcry. For example, an e-mail I recently received says, “These so-called court ‘reforms’ include ending life tenure for Supreme Court justices and a binding code of ethics for the justices that would be overseen by Congress. President Biden’s plan is a thinly veiled political scheme to intimidate and control the U.S. Supreme Court justices. This would threaten an independent judiciary and the rule of law.”

We could parse that passage but instead this is a time when we should look at state governments to calculate the dangers to an independent judiciary of an eighteen-year term. States, too, want their high court to be unbiased, but almost all states have rejected the federal model.

Rhode Island is the only state to grant life tenure to its Supreme Court justices. Two other jurisdictions allow service until the justice reaches seventy. In the other states, the justices have limited terms, which often are quite short compared to how long many of our federal justices now serve. New York has the longest term at fourteen years. Eleven states have ten-year terms. The rest have fewer than ten-year terms with fifteen states limiting justices to six years.

At least from what the states overwhelmingly indicate, life tenure for justices is not necessary for a good judiciary. Indeed, the clear rejection of that life term seems to indicate that the states have concluded that life tenure is bad for good government.