Penna Dexter
The United States Senate is considering legislation that would require the Supreme Court to set up a code of conduct, tighten financial disclosure rules, and bolster recusal requirements for justices. The bill would allow individual complaints against justices. Each complaint would be adjudicated by a “judicial investigation panel” of 5 chief judges from the circuit courts.
The proposed bill violates the US Constitution’s separation of powers. Supreme Court  justices police their own financial disclosures and make their own recusal decisions. But since the Court as currently composed is not giving the Left the rulings it wants, progressives are attacking certain justices’ ethics.
Last month, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act passed the Senate Judiciary Committee along party lines.
After the vote, six committee Republicans told reporters that, if enacted, the legislation would destroy the independence of the Supreme Court. Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) said the bill “should make every American afraid.”
A Wall Street Journal editorial argues, “The nine justices are appointees with lifetime tenure under the Constitution in order to insulate them from political pressure.”  Enacting this bill would do the opposite. The Journal points out that “Legislators are political actors accountable to voters for their relationships with campaign contributors and interest groups.” The Founders created the judiciary, under Article III of the Constitution, as a separate and co-equal branch of government.
The Journal emphasizes, “While Congress established the lower federal courts, the Constitution created the Supreme Court which sets its own rules.”  Congress has no power to set rules for the Court or dictate how it is run.
Justice Samuel Alito told the Journal he and the other justices voluntarily follow the disclosure statutes that lower court judges and executive branch officials adhere to. But, he says, “No provision in the US Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”
The Senate must block this attempt to intimidate justices and control the Court. 

Kerby Anderson
The “world is on fire.” That is the repeated claim of environmental activists who claim that fires are increasing worldwide due to climate change. But is that statement true? Satellites have (for more than two decades) been recording fires on the surface of this planet. We know more about the global phenomenon than ever before.
Bjorn Lomborg reminds us that the “data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3 percent of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.” In the last year (2022) for which we have complete data, the world hit a new record low in terms of burned area. Of course, you wouldn’t know this by reading news accounts or watching television news programs.
Three years ago, I devoted a commentary debunking the claim that the terrible brush fires in Australia were made worse by climate change. At the time, I suggested a simple test. If the pattern in Australia was due to climate change, then you might expect to see the same pattern worldwide. A global survey of wildfire activity back then found less fire activity, not more.
The Canadian wildfires this year certainly got our attention since the smoke covered large parts of the northeastern US. The Canadian prime minister and the US president blamed climate change. But you find the same phenomenon I mentioned years ago. Yes, more land was burned this year in North America, but the rest of the world has seen lower burning.
The latest headlines about fires are reminiscent of the previous headlines about the future extinction of polar bears due to climate change. We don’t hear much about the polar bears these days perhaps because they are more populous than at any time in the last half-century.
The “world is on fire” makes for a scary headline, but it isn’t accurate science.