After overcoming chills and a fever, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is back home from the hospital. Seeing as she’s beat cancer four times and can still bench 70 pounds even while pushing 90, her recovery comes as no surprise. But the ability of her health to throw the country into a frenzy point is a serious defect in our system of lifetime federal judicial appointments. What we need is a system of term limits for judges, like the ones that already exist for tax judges.

As a purely practical matter, term limits are overdue for District Courts, where the fates of most people coming to a federal court are decided by a single judge. Whereas Supreme Court Justices have both their staffs and their peers keeping their acuity in check, a district court judge can slowly descend to senility without much notice.