"The same justices who feel harassed and exposed because reporters are combing through their undisclosed financial dealings right now could have solved this problem..."

"... with candor and honest reporting of their financial dealings on the routine occasions on which they were asked. In the midst of the crisis, they eschew a commitment to candor to instead mutter something about the nature of checks and balances, with the proviso that they are susceptible to neither. These are the ploys of emperors.... He wields a gavel, not a scepter. And the Constitution grants him no overarching right to insulate his entire court from the kind of minimal accountability without which no democracy can thrive."

Write Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, in "King Roberts/The chief justice’s latest trick to ward off oversight is the ploy of a royal, not a judge" (Slate).

But the Constitution does insulate the Court from political pressure. It's not complete insulation, but that's why this article is framed as a call for "minimal accountability." The question then is whether what Roberts's refusal to do was in fact only a request for minimal accountability. Senator Dick Durbin asked him testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Court's ethics. Roberts, declining, wrote: 

“Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by the Chief Justice of the United States is exceedingly rare, as one might expect in light of separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.” 

Was Durbin seeking "minimal accountability" or a theatrical occasion to smack the Chief Justice around? Roberts had good reason to suspect the latter.

And speaking of theatrical: that Lithwick and Stern piece in Slate. All this talk of emperors and wielding a scepter! 

I remember when that was the rhetoric of the right. Here's Ed Meese in 1997, railing about "The Imperial Judiciary":