Chief Justice Roberts Refuses Senate Testimony on Supreme Court Ethics.

Chief Justice John Roberts has declined an invitation from the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify before the panel on judicial ethics, calling such testimony by chief justices "exceedingly rare." The Senate panel had planned to hold a hearing on May 2 to examine what Sen. Dick Durbin called "common sense proposals" to hold Supreme Court justices to the same ethical standards as the rest of the federal judiciary. Roberts noted that only two previous chief justices have testified before Congress, and in each case, the testimony concerned what he called "mundane matters."