On the night of Tuesday, April 28, 2026, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett attended the white-tie state dinner Trump hosted at the White House for Britain's King Charles III, each accompanied by a spouse, according to the published guest list and BBC reporting. None of the three justices nominated by Democratic presidents was there, “invited or not,” MS NOW's Lisa Rubin wrote. The justices made up nearly 10% of the roughly 130 guests.
A justice at a state dinner is not unusual in itself. MS NOW noted that Antonin Scalia attended a 2012 state dinner, Stephen Breyer attended dinners in 2011 and 2022, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended one during the Obama presidency. But typically a single justice attends, as when Roberts went to Trump's first state dinner in 2018. Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck told MS NOW that historically it is not uncommon for justices to attend state functions, even during high-profile cases involving the president, but that “the problem here” is “the symbolism, that these six justices — and only these six — were there. It does nothing to disabuse the appearance that the court is playing partisan political favorites, an impression this court should be invested in avoiding.”
The court's 2023 code of conduct says a justice should “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary” and cautions against “extrajudicial activities” that “reflect adversely on the Justice's impartiality.” The code has no enforcement mechanism. Rubin asked whether the justices have enough self-awareness “to recognize when their conduct falls short of their own rhetoric,” pointing to Roberts' year-end report praising life tenure as a safeguard of judicial independence.
The timing sharpened the question. Hours after the dinner, on April 29, the court released a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais that MS NOW described as significantly weakening the Voting Rights Act, and the dinner fell on the eve of oral argument over the administration's ending of Temporary Protected Status for Syrian and Haitian immigrants. On April 30, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry issued an executive order suspending the state's May 16 and June 27 U.S. House primaries in response to the Callais ruling; other offices on the May 16 ballot went ahead (see Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry Suspends the State's U.S. House Primaries by Executive Order, Citing the Supreme Court's Decision Gutting the Voting Rights Act). On April 28, the day of the dinner, the White House posted a photo of Trump beside Charles captioned “TWO KINGS.”
No rule the justices can be held to was shown to be broken. The concern critics raised is appearance: the entire Republican-appointed majority socializing at a Trump White House event while the court had cases involving his administration and his political coalition before it.
Correction (October 2, 2026): This entry misquoted Steve Vladeck, cutting “and only these six” short and rendering “favorites” as “favors”; the quotation now matches MS NOW. It said Gov. Landry suspended “state primary elections”; his order suspended only the U.S. House primaries. It described the Temporary Protected Status case as one in which the administration's position “aligned with the justices,” a characterization no source supports, and it included claims about a “Strait of Trump” repost, Trump-portrait passports and a crown emoji on the “TWO KINGS” post that were not supported by the sources consulted; those were removed.