Despite public support for televising Supreme Court hearings, the ban will remain for the foreseeable future and the issue isn’t much of a topic of conversation among the justices, two of them told a House appropriations subcommittee Thursday, reports the Washington Post. Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan both said they thought before joining the court that hearings should be televised. Alito said justices now agree that attorney grandstanding would be “irresistible” and undermine “our paramount function, which is to decide cases in the best possible way.” He added, “I recognize most people think that our arguments should be televised. Most of the members of my family think the arguments should be televised.”
Subcommittee chairman Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Il.) said, “Most Americans have no idea how Supreme Court proceedings even work.,” He acknowledged Congress would not force the issue on an equal branch of government. Kagan said the justices as a group have not discussed the policy since she joined the court in 2010. Kagan said that when she observed the court as President Obama’s solicitor general, she thought it would be good for the public to see what she saw. “It was thoughtful and it was probing and it was obvious that the justices really wanted to get things right,” Kagan said. “And it’s no small benefit if the American public were able to see that.” Now, she believes justices might “filter” themselves if they worried that playing devil’s advocate might be interpreted in a video clip as being biased. If seeing the court at work “came at the expense of the way the institution functioned, that would be a very bad bargain,” she said.