As a younger lawyer within the Reagan White House, John G. Roberts Jr. was tartly dismissive of the Supreme Court’s lengthy summer time break, which stretches from the top of June to the primary Monday in October.

“Only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren,” he wrote in 1983, “are expected to and do take the entire summer off.”

On the opposite hand, the younger lawyer wrote, there’s an upside to the break: “We know that the Constitution is safe for the summer.”

These days, members of the court docket discover time to quarrel in regards to the Constitution even within the heat months. The major antagonists currently have been Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Elena Kagan.

Last summer time, they clashed over whether or not selections just like the one eliminating the constitutional right to abortion threatened the court docket’s legitimacy.

In current months, the 2 justices have continued to spar, although on a distinct topic: whether or not Congress has the constitutional authority to manage points of the court docket’s work.

The query is well timed, after all, as news studies have raised moral questions on, among other things, luxurious journey supplied to Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas. Those studies have led to proposed laws to impose new ethics guidelines on the court docket.

Justice Alito, in an interview published in The Wall Street Journal final month, appeared to object, saying that “Congress did not create the Supreme Court.”

He added: “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it. No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”

A couple of days later, at a judicial convention in Portland, Ore., Justice Kagan took the opposite view, although she cautioned that The Journal had not reproduced the query that had prompted Justice Alito’s reply. She indicated, graciously, that he couldn’t have meant what he appeared to say.

“Of course Congress can regulate various aspects of what the Supreme Court does,” she stated, ticking off an inventory of the way by which lawmakers can act. Congress units the court docket’s finances. It can improve or shrink the dimensions of the court docket, and it has through the years done both. It could make modifications to the court docket’s jurisdiction.

Indeed, the Constitution provides that the court docket has appellate jurisdiction “with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.”

All of that is unsurprising, Justice Kagan stated.

“It just can’t be that the court is the only institution that somehow is not subject to any checks and balances from anybody else,” she stated, including, “I mean, we are not imperial.”

On the broader query of whether or not Congress could regulate some points of the court docket’s actions, Justice Kagan appeared to have the higher of the argument. She didn’t supply an opinion on the narrower query of whether or not Congress could impose a code of ethics on the justices, however she stated the court docket remained free to behave.

“Regardless of what Congress does, the court can do stuff,” Justice Kagan stated, including, “We could decide to adopt a code of conduct of our own that either follows or decides in certain instances not to follow the standard codes of conduct.”

In remarks at an awards ceremony in May, Chief Justice Roberts stated that work remained underway. But he added it was a job for the court docket, not Congress.

“I want to assure people that I am committed to making certain that we as a court adhere to the highest standards of conduct,” he stated. “We are continuing to look at things we can do to give practical effect to that commitment, and I am confident that there are ways to do that consistent with our status as an independent branch of government and the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

It was not clear, although, that consensus among the many justices was on the horizon, Justice Kagan stated.

“It’s not a secret for me to say that we have been discussing this issue,” she stated. “And it won’t be a surprise to know that the nine of us have a variety of views about this, as about most things. We’re nine freethinking individuals.”

Congress has enacted legal guidelines that apply to the justices, together with ones on monetary disclosures and recusal. In a manner, essentially the most telling ethics laws got here from the primary Congress, in 1789, requiring all federal judges, together with Supreme Court justices, to take an oath promising “that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent on me.”

If Congress can take all of these actions, it could appear to be free to enact a code of moral requirements, Amanda Frost, a regulation professor on the University of Virginia, wrote in a 2013 law review article.

“The Supreme Court is not an isolated institution intended to operate entirely free from the political branches — to the contrary, it has always depended on the political branches to lay out the parameters governing its exercise of judicial power,” Professor Frost wrote, including, “Congress’s authority over judicial ethics is less surprising once one realizes that Congress has long assumed the power to regulate many important aspects of the court’s daily activities.”