I suspect, based on your comment, that you and I have a fair amount of conflict in our expressed politics. (I was firmly in the “May RBG hang on for dear life” camp.) Nevertheless, I agree with the core tenet here: term limits would be a major improvement for the SCOTUS, even if relatively lengthy. They would mitigate for all involved parties the otherwise daunting threat of a particular personality, potentially ideologically incompatible with one’s own worldview, holding sway open-endedly and potentially for a generation.
(Separately: I found that the NPR link didn’t work for me at first, and checked NYT; they had not yet posted an obit.)
The courts are politicized i.e. partisan, but holding Gender Equality "activism" up as an example of this would be counterproductive. This would make anything other than extreme textualism sacrilege, although equality is in the spirit of the constitution if not the attitudes of those who wrote it (i.e. They owned slaves).
Being in favour of gender equality, is a political statement - politics is a catch all term for every heated interaction between people that (hopefully) doesn't involve guns. You have to have some political principles to guide your court.
Also relevant, the recent Trans rights supreme court ruling - makes some people uneasy (Politics!) but still absolutely the right thing to do (in vacuo or within the context of the CRA). I would link to it but Visual Studio has just starting rebooting my computer...
It's not even surprising when you consider that SCOTUS judges are, by constitutional design, appointed by presidents, who by design, are supposed to represent the electorate.
If judges were supposed to be pure judges and not activists, they would be selected by an independent process purely based on legal / academic merit.
All judges, but especially Supreme Court ones, are political activists. They just have the education and experience to wrap it in legal language.
