⁍ Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett said she was open to allowing cameras into the chamber for the first time in its 230-year history.

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⁍ Advocates of cameras in the courtroom argue that it is an important step to allow transparency in the judicial process.

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⁍ Some U.S. state and local courts permit cameras and allow live TV broadcasts of certain proceedings, but federal courts largely do not.

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– Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said during her Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday that she would “keep an open mind” about allowing cameras into the courtroom, Reuters reports. The move would “open the courts to the public and bring a better understanding of the judiciary,” said Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has been pushing for cameras in the Supreme Court for at least 15 years. While nominees have expressed openness to cameras before, sitting justices have been opposed. They argue that allowing video coverage would make it difficult to conduct arguments effectively and would encourage theatrics by attorneys arguing before them. In 1996, former Justice David Souter, now 81 and retired from the high court, drew a hard line on the matter: “The day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it’s going to roll over my dead body.” Grassley, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, acknowledged the difficulty. He noted Souter’s comment, and invoked his own mortality by calling his push for cameras “another interest of mine that at 87 years of age I won’t live long enough to see done.”