A 6-3 conservative supermajority has placed the highest on the Supreme Court, and not in a good way.

Major court rulings in the past tenure have continued to defy precedent and expand their powers against the president and congress. All the while, reports of judges’ ethics violations piled up, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. reached out for calls for reform, claiming against all evidence that the judges can control themselves.

The worrying result for our democracy is a court with more power and less legitimacy. Public opinion of the justices remains at an all-time low: Less than a third of American voters have a favorable opinion of the Supreme Court, according to a recent NBC News poll.

The judges have left for their summer vacations with their families or perhaps with their favorite right-wing billionaires, who knows why Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alitos failed to publicize such junkets? but the court will remain in the headlines. This Thursday, the Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote on Supreme Court reforms that gained support with the unintentional help of the justices. The legislation would require the court to create a code of conduct, create a lower court to review ethics complaints against the judges and tighten federal laws governing their financial disclosures and recuses of conflict-of-interest cases.

The bill would fall short of calls from progressives to expand the court to water down conservatives with a bad idea that would only further politicize the institution (as President Biden argues). The bill also lacks term limits for judges, a much better idea, especially given Republican presidents’ habit of electing relatively young nominees who can serve on the bench for decades, though this may require an amendment to the Constitution.

“Since the Court does nothing, Congress does,” Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said in a joint statement.

Tough talk, but the measure will not become law. Republicans will take care of that through either a filibuster in the Senate or a funeral in the GOP-controlled House.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky slammed Democrats for trying to tell an equivalent branch of government how to manage its internal operations, ostensibly to clean up its ethics. He did not mention the scandals. He also defended the court’s recent decisions, which of course he would: The rulings, especially those against federal clean air and water regulations, are exactly what the coal state senator had in mind when he abused the Senate’s confirmation power to to create the conservative supermajority.

Despite the political stalemate, this debate will keep alive the issue of court ethics and jurisprudence. And that’s a good thing.

This is not a normal court, Biden said recently. It has, he later added, done more to unravel basic rights and fundamental decisions than any court in recent history.

Fact check: true.

Following last year’s landmark rulings that overturned precedents on abortion, gun rights and separation of church and state, the Conservatives’ latest decisions further undermined the power of federal agencies, weakening wetland protections and hurting government debt relief. university for millions of Americans was reversed. Ominously, by filing lawsuits over Biden’s debt program and an attempt by web designers to deny services to same-sex couples, the court opened its doors to other plaintiffs of questionable legal standing who just happen to share the Conservatives’ agenda.

After decades of decrying judicial activism, Republicans are celebrating a Supreme Court justice that has taken activism to a whole new level. And what makes the power grab of the courts and the lack of ethical accountability all the more reprehensible is that, unlike the key players in our other branches of government, the judges are unelected and tenured. Their decisions cannot be appealed, legally or politically.

As Judge Elena Kagan wrote in the Liberals’ dissent on Roberts College’s guilt opinion: At the behest of a party that has suffered no harm, the majority decides a disputed matter of public policy that belongs to the politically responsible departments and the people which they represent. She called that a threat to a democratic order.

To which prickly Roberts ranted: It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinion to criticize the decisions they disagree with as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.

However, the term’s most arrogant act was not a statement; it was Robert’s condescending rejection of Durbin’s invitation to testify on judicial ethics and reform. No concerns about separation of powers or precedent prevented Roberts from getting off his couch to provide much-needed transparency, humility, and responsiveness to a troubled public.

But Roberts instead sent a predictably dismissive reply: I must respectfully decline your invitation.

In other words, he reigns supreme.

@jackiekcalmes