With the Supreme Court mired in ethical scandals, Amy Coney Barrett is has suggested that she supports establishing a stronger code of conduct—and claimed her colleagues do, too. “There is no lack of consensus among the justices,” the conservative said at an event Monday, implying that she thinks it would be a “good idea” to adopt the same standards as lower courts. “There’s unanimity among all nine justices that we should and do hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards possible.”

Her remarks seem to indicate an openness to the kinds of reforms Democratic watchdog groups and lawmakers like Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Hank Johnson have long been pushing for. Their calls for the high court to at least adopt at the same standards as lower court judges intensified earlier this year, when revelations about the ethical violations of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito began to emerge. But Chief Justice John Roberts has been evasive, at times expressing a “commitment” to addressing the court’s legitimacy crisis while also suggesting he thinks the glorified honor system the court currently abides by is working just fine. And Republicans, for their part, have stood in the way of Democrats’ legislative efforts to usher in reform. “This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court,” Lindsey Graham, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said at an ethics hearing in the spring on the Thomas scandal.

But if all the nine justices—Thomas and Alito included, presumably—are in lockstep on ethics, as Barrett suggested, what’s with all the resistance? “That’s something I can’t really speak for the court about or make any sort of guess about,” she said. 

Perhaps Barrett can’t hazard a guess, but I will: There hasn’t been any formal movement toward reform because the justices are not actually in agreement, as liberal justice Elena Kagan indicated over the summer, expressing her own support for a code of ethics: “It’s not a secret for me to say that we have been discussing this issue,” Kagan said in August. “And it won’t be a surprise to know that the nine of us have a variety of views about this.” Those views, presumably, run the gamut, from sure, ethics are good to I am all-powerful and any suggestion otherwise is unconstitutional. And maybe that’s not exactly what the scandal-plagued Alito had said in decrying Democratic efforts to reform the court. But that’s been the spirit of both justices’ defenses of the high court and the way the conservatives have carried themselves on and off the bench.

Far from aspiring to the “highest ethical standards possible,” as Barrett claimed, the right-wing majority has regularly trampled norms, often taking an extraordinarily activist approach to their work while routinely thumbing their noses at the idea of accountability. Would it be nice if the comments from Barrett, Roberts, and Brett Kavanaugh represented an actual shift in attitude at the high court? Of course. But if they actually support a code of ethics, then it's time for them to put their money where their mouth is.