Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett appeared last month before House and Senate panels to testify in support of the Supreme Court’s annual budget request, marking the first appearance by Supreme Court justices before Congress since 2019. The hearings provided a rare opportunity for lawmakers and the public to examine not only the Court’s operational needs, but to have them answer questions about more substantive issues regarding ethics and transparency.
Such appearances are actually not extraordinary — at least, they weren’t until relatively recently. Indeed, regular interaction between Supreme Court justices and Congress has deep historical roots.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, congressional testimony by sitting Supreme Court justices constituted a regular aspect of interbranch governance. Between 1960 and 2022, justices appeared before congressional committees or subcommittees across 93 hearings. At least one justice testified before Congress every year from 1960 through 2011, demonstrating that such appearances were once a routine aspect of interbranch relations rather than an exceptional occurrence. Approximately 92 percent of these appearances occurred before the House or Senate Appropriations Committees, where the justices primarily testified on matters concerning the judiciary’s budget and administration.
This year’s hearings, however, demonstrated that such appearances can serve a broader purpose than simply defending the Court’s budget, which includes a significant requested increase for additional security. Although Barrett and Kagan appropriately declined to comment on pending litigation, they did answer questions concerning judicial administration, ethics, public confidence, and the operation of the federal courts.
Notably, they addressed criticism that the Supreme Court’s 2023 Code of Conduct lacks a formal enforcement mechanism. They also described the personal impact of escalating threats against members of the judiciary, with Barrett observing that such threats “are meant to intimidate, and they’re meant to harass.” Their willingness to engage on these institutional issues provided a level of transparency that has become increasingly uncommon in modern Supreme Court practice.
Only in recent decades have such appearances become uncommon, creating the mistaken impression that direct engagement between the judiciary and Congress is inconsistent with the separation of powers. The Congressional Research Service identified no appearances by a sitting justice during 11 of the 15 years preceding the July 2026 hearings. This represents a significant departure from the historical norm, transforming what had once been a regular feature of interbranch communication into a rare event.
The recent return of Kagan and Barrett to Capitol Hill therefore marks not merely the resumption of a paused practice, but an opportunity to revive an important tradition of transparency and institutional accountability for the judicial branch. Such engagement is especially valuable at a time when the Court exercises unprecedented influence over some of the nation’s most consequential legal and political disputes while remaining largely insulated from meaningful public accountability.
