The state dinner held earlier this week for King Charles III and Queen Camilla looked different from most, for a few different reasons. One of them was that the six conservative justices were in attendance, while none of the three liberals were.
According to MS NOW, this has raised some alarm bells among judicial watchdogs.
“Less remarked upon was the attire, much less the attendance, of six especially notable guests: Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, each of whom was accompanied by their respective spouses,” the MS NOW story said. “The Supreme Court contingent represented nearly 10% of the roughly 130 guests, which also included several Fox News journalists and executives, multiple Cabinet secretaries, some tech company titans, and a handful of senior White House aides.”
Not a good look: All 6 conservative justices attended Trump’s white-tie state dinner https://t.co/W7kG76qlUy
— cctish (Colleen ) (@cctish) May 1, 2026
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Justices, the story said, have attended state dinners before; the late Justice Antonin Scalia once attended one hosted by President Barack Obama, and Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg also attended such dinners.
But what is rare is for the justices appointed by one particular party to be there, while those appointed by the other party are not. In most cases, one justice has been there rather than a whole bloc.
The banquet guest list included the six conservative Supreme Court justices, over a dozen top CEOs, six Fox News hosts, six members of Congress, the president’s Cabinet… and one golf champion.
Complete guest list at the state dinner for King Charles in this website. Several… pic.twitter.com/UZBEXqpCVX
— Blanche Victoria (@tammytabby) April 30, 2026
“The presence of the entire conservative wing of the court on Tuesday night — just hours before it released a 6-3 decision significantly weakening the Voting Rights Act, and on the eve of oral argument about the legality of the administration ending temporary protected status for Syrian and Haitian immigrants — struck some court observers as unusual,” MS NOW reported.
“The problem here,” Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown professor who writes regular about the court, “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.”
There are also questions about whether attendance at the dinner violated the Court’s code of conduct- especially since the code does not have any real enforcement mechanism.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
