Accountability

The Supreme Court announced this week that it will begin using conflict-of-interest detection software to identify when justices should recuse themselves from cases. Parties filing before the Court will now be required to list stock ticker symbols in their filings to help the software flag potential conflicts. It sounds like progress. It isn’t—or at least, it isn’t nearly enough. The announcement is the latest example of the Court responding to legitimate ethics crises with the minimum possible action: a technical workaround that avoids confronting the actual problem. The actual problem is that two Supreme Court justices are still holding individual company stocks while deciding cases that affect American corporations, their shareholders, and the broader economy. ...

Two weeks after Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election, Chief Justice John Roberts summoned Supreme Court employees to a grand conference room and made them sign nondisclosure agreements threatening legal action if they revealed what happens behind the Court’s closed doors. This wasn’t a response to national security concerns. It was a response to the American public learning the truth about how the Court operates. According to a new report from The New York Times, the Supreme Court has converted what was once an informal expectation of confidentiality into formal legal contracts—complete with threats of litigation. The timing and circumstances reveal everything wrong with the Court’s approach to accountability. ...

In December 2025, bulldozers demolished the entire East Wing of the White House to make way for a new ballroom — a roughly $300 million construction project undertaken without congressional authorization, without the historic-preservation review federal law normally requires, and without the president’s earlier promise that taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook for it. A preservation group sued to stop it. On August 31, 2026, the Supreme Court let construction continue. Here’s the detail worth sitting with: the Court didn’t rule the project was legal. It ruled that the people suing weren’t allowed to ask. ...

Sitting justices almost never testify before Congress. It last happened with any regularity decades ago, and the institution has spent years treating its own internal workings as none of the legislature’s business. On July 14, 2026, that changed — Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett appeared before the House Appropriations Committee to defend a $921 million security budget request. They left having conceded, on the record, something the Court has spent years refusing to say plainly: it doesn’t have settled rules for how it uses the tool that now decides more cases than its actual docket. ...