John Roberts on Tuesday turned down Dick Durbin’s request to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, claiming that doing so could pose a risk to the Supreme Court’s “judicial independence” and suggesting that the high court is not in need of reform. “I must respectfully decline your invitation,” the chief justice wrote to Durbin, the committee chair, in a statement of ethics signed by all nine justices Tuesday. Such testimony, he added, is “exceedingly rare, as one might expect in light of separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.” 

Roberts' letter is just the latest display of the court's contempt for the American public. For weeks, members of the the bench have been under renewed scrutiny following revelations about Clarence Thomas’s lucrative friendship with conservative billionaire Harlan Crow, which prompted Democrats to press Roberts for an internal inquiry. Durbin and his colleagues have argued that the high court—whose members enjoy awesome power and lifetime appointments—should be held at least to the same ethical standard as others in the judicial branch. But Roberts’ reluctance to even publicly address the still-unfolding scandals–let alone submit himself for questioning about them on Capitol Hill next week—underscores both the challenges in reining in this rogue court and the urgent need to do so. “Supreme Court ethics reform must happen whether the Court participates in the process or not,” Durbin said in a statement late Tuesday, vowing to go ahead with the May 2 hearing without Roberts. “It is time for Congress to accept its responsibility to establish an enforceable code of ethics for the Supreme Court, the only agency of our government without it.”

Roberts has long dismissed the need for reform: In 2011—after a congressional hearing on earlier conflict of interest concerns about Thomas’s relationship with Crow and his wife Ginni Thomas’s activism, as well as liberal justice Elena Kagan’s previous work for the Obama administration—the chief justice claimed that the high court had “no reason to adopt the Code of Conduct as its definitive source of ethical guidance.”

“We are all deeply committed to the common interest in preserving the Court’s vital role as an impartial tribunal governed by the rule of law,” Roberts added in his year-end report at the time, arguing that “instances of judges abandoning their oath ‘to faithfully and impartially discharge and perform’ the duties of their office have been exceedingly rare.”

But Americans have been given good reason of late to believe these improprieties are far more common than Roberts insists they are. Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the radical GOP installed a right-wing supermajority on the high court that has bulldozed longstanding precedent, attacked Americans’ rights, and flaunted their unchecked power over their fellow citizens. Thomas has been particularly egregious in his disregard for judicial integrity: He has refused to recuse himself from matters related to January 6, despite his wife’s involvement in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election; he has, as ProPublica reported this month, hobnobbed with powerful conservatives and lobbyists during luxury vacations gifted by Crow, who also bought properties owned by Thomas and his family; and he has failed to disclose those gifts, as required by law. These are obvious transgressions, and they demand accountability—both for the sake of the rule of law and for the sake of public trust in the Supreme Court, which has been in absolute free-fall.

As it stands, such accountability for Thomas—or Neil Gorsuch, who also seems to have failed to fully report a real estate transaction that posed clear conflict of interest concerns—might have to come from the court itself. (Democrats and watchdog groups have called for Justice Department investigation into Thomas, but it is unclear if Attorney General Merrick Garland—whose nomination to the high court in 2016 was blocked by Republicans in a hardball move that eventually led to the ascent of Gorsuch—will take such action.) But Roberts—with the support of his fellow justices, including the three liberals who signed his woefully inadequate ethics statement to Durbin—is making plain that he believes the court should answer to no one.

It’s up to Congress to prove him wrong. Roberts may be invoking the need to preserve the separation of powers in refusing Durbin’s invitation, but Congress has a need to preserve the system of checks and balances that, in theory, should prevent nine unelected political appointees from acting like an all-powerful body with no responsibility to the public. “They believe they are an untouchable, unaccountable super-legislature,” as Sarah Lipton-Lubet, executive director of Take Back the Court, put it in a statement Tuesday. “And unless Congress uses its constitutional power to show them otherwise, nothing will change.”