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On Tuesday, Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett testified before Congress, seeking a $14 million budget increase for security measures to protect the justices and their families. Congress should take the opportunity to do something more than just boost the court’s budget: It should create a robust inspection office to oversee the millions of dollars’ worth of gifts the justices receive each year, assess the justices’ recusal responsibilities, and address other ethics issues. Doing so would relieve the court of diverting its other resources to these ethics matters or, worse, undervaluing them altogether. It would also make the justices safer in the long run from a public increasingly dissatisfied with their arbitrary secrecy.

To understand the delicate balance between safety and ethics on the court, we need to go back to 2022, when, for the first time in SCOTUS history, a draft opinion was leaked in Dobbs, the case overturning Roe v. Wade. Outside the court, the leak sparked outrage about the substance of the opinion ending the constitutional right to abortion. But inside the court (and in conservative media circles), a procedural concern seemed to matter more than the constitutional rights the justices were about to end: Who had leaked the draft?

In trying to answer that question, though, the court had a problem. It didn’t have an entity capable of investigating the leak. The closest woman for the job was Gail Curley, the Supreme Court’s marshal. So, the day after the leak, the court ordered the marshal’s office to perform a task it had never done before: probe the more than 80 employees who might have had access to the Dobbs opinion to determine who could have leaked it to Politico. Months later, the marshal released a report proposing tweaks to the court’s IT procedures but concluding that the office was unable to find the source of the leak.

This outcome wasn’t surprising, given both the complexity of the court’s ask and the marshal’s limited experience conducting these types........

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