Turn Off Lights For SCOTUS ?

A Supreme Court justice said something out loud this week that most people never think about.

Justice Samuel Alito spoke Thursday night to more than a thousand conservative lawyers in Washington. He told them Congress has the power to turn off the lights at the Supreme Court. He meant it almost word for word. Congress could cut the court’s money and stop everything from happening.

He is right about the power. The Constitution says a judge’s pay cannot be cut while he sits on the bench. But that is about all it protects. The clerks, the staff, the security, the building, the electric bill all come from Congress. Congress holds the purse. It always has.

Alito never said who he was worried about. He did not have to. A week before, Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate. Their leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, said back in August that dramatic Supreme Court reform is necessary. Everyone in that room knew where the wind was blowing.

An independent court matters. It matters more than any one justice, and more than any one ruling. The day a court can be starved into line by whoever won the last election is the day the court stops being a court. It becomes one more office that answers to power.

That is true when your side wins. It is just as true when your side loses.

Most of us defend an independent court when it rules our way. We call it the rule of law. When it rules against us, a lot of us start talking about rigged and illegitimate. That is not a principle. That is a scoreboard.

A stern people hold the same rule both ways. Same standard Monday as Friday. Same standard whoever holds the gavel.

In that same speech, Alito went after the lower courts. He said some federal judges had gone far astray and abused their power by blocking the president’s policies. He wants the purse kept off his court’s neck. But he wants the courts below him reined in when they get in the president’s way.

You cannot have it both ways. If judicial independence is worth defending, it is worth defending all the way down. The district judge in a small courtroom who tells a president no is doing the same job the Supreme Court does. Independence is not just for the top floor.

He also said something I keep turning over. He compared the three branches to weapons. A hand grenade, a 500-pound bomb, and a nuclear weapon. The court is the hand grenade, he said. The least dangerous. But still dangerous.

I understand what he meant. But I wish he had picked a different picture. A court is not supposed to think of itself as a weapon at all. It is supposed to be the place where the weapons get checked.

We have been here before.

In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt won one of the biggest landslides in American history. He carried every state but two. His party held Congress by huge margins. And the Supreme Court had been striking down his New Deal laws one after another.

So in 1937, Roosevelt tried to fix the court. His plan would have let him add a new justice for every one over seventy, up to six of them. Everybody knew what it was. He wanted enough votes to win.

His own party stopped him. Democrats in the Senate, men who loved Roosevelt and agreed with his programs, killed that plan. They decided the court mattered more than winning. The plan died that summer.

That is the standard. Not blind loyalty to the court. Not blind loyalty to your party. Loyalty to the rule that the referee does not get swapped out because you do not like the calls.

There is a difference between punishing a court and reforming one.

Congress has every right to write ethics rules. Justices should have to report their gifts and their trips like every other public servant. Term limits are a fair debate. Reasonable people from both sides have argued for them. Those are rules for the future, made in the open, applied the same to every justice.

Cutting the money to get different rulings is something else. That is a squeeze. It is using the purse as a club. If the Democrats do that, they will hand the next Republican Congress the same club, and it will get used again and again. That is how a country stops having a court and starts having a hostage.

It cuts the other way too. Last summer, two justices, Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett, one from each side of the bench, went to Capitol Hill together. They asked Congress to fund the courts and pay for more security, because threats against judges keep rising. That is the court asking for help, not demanding a free pass. That is how it is supposed to work.

Watch the new Congress. Watch what it does with the court. If it writes clear rules that apply to everybody, give it a fair hearing. If it reaches for the purse to punish rulings it does not like, say no. Say it to your own side first, because that is the only no that counts.

And watch the court too. Watch whether the justices hold themselves to the same standard they ask of everyone else. Independence is not the same thing as being above the rules.

The lights at the Supreme Court belong to all of us. Nobody should get to flip that switch because they won an election. And no justice should forget who pays the electric bill.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

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