Justice Elena Kagan declined Thursday to outright answer the question of whether Congress could impose an ethics code on the Supreme Court, but she did allow that it could do “various things” to regulate the high court.
“It just can’t be that the court is the only institution that is somehow not subject to any checks and balances from anybody else,” she said, adding, “I mean, we are not imperial.”
“We, too, are part of a checks and balances system,” she said.
It absolutely is, and actually it used to be even closer to the house of lords. Up until this last century the US Senate was not directly elected, the state government would appoint the state’s senators. IIRC the Senate was inspired by the house of lords, the major difference being term limits instead of lifetime appointments.
(I imagine the Senate was more meaningful back when the state government couldn’t talk to people in Washington in seconds)