Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recently kicked off a controversy by saying that "No provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period." Taken literally, that statement is nonsense. Congress clearly does have power to regulate the Court in a variety of ways. Alito is also probably wrong if we interpret his statement more narrowly, as merely saying that Congress has no power to impose an ethics code on the justices, as various critics of the Court have recently advocated. But congressional power over the Court is not unlimited. And some ethics rules could potentially run afoul of constitutional constraints.
