Protection for the Justices, but What About the Rest of Us?
In an age of political violence, the Supreme Court deserves enhanced protection. If only they treated the American people with the same concern.
In mid-July, Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett crossed the street to Capitol Hill for an all-too-rare appearance before Congress. Their goal: to get Congress to put up more money for the justices’ security.
The Court’s budget request for the upcoming fiscal year includes more than $207 million for expenses not including their own salaries (which are constitutionally protected from being reduced), an increase of some $131 million and 333 full-time employees since 2016, according to SCOTUSblog. A big chunk of that increase is the result of beefed-up security: In the new request, $14 million would go toward the hiring of 84 more officers and support staff to protect the Supreme Court building and the justices themselves.
It’s a lot of money, but listening to Kagan and Barrett speak personally about this issue, it was hard not to sympathize. Two months before the hearing, Barrett said, her teenage son had opened the front door to a street full of police officers responding to false reports of gunshots at the justice’s home — the latest “swatting” incident targeting a high-profile individual.
That was just one of the many threats received by the justices, who have faced a skyrocketing number in recent years, particularly since the Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022. Weeks before the justices announced that ruling, a version of which had been leaked to the public, a person was arrested in the middle of the night outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home, having travelled across the country to assassinate him.
We live in an age of political violence, and top government officials are obviously right to be worried for their safety. They deserve to perform their jobs free from the fear that they will be killed.
But — and here’s what at least some of the justices don’t seem very concerned about, if they fathom it at all — the rest of us deserve no less.
Instead, thanks in large part to decisions by this Supreme Court striking down gun restrictions of all types, Americans have grown accustomed to living in a land where they can be gunned down at any moment, for any reason, in any space, public or private: at work, at home, in school, at church, at the movies, at a concert, at a food festival — even in the halls of Congress where they made such a compelling case for their own protection. I think about this every day when my kids are in school; each time a police siren sounds in the distance, I wonder, did it happen here? Did the guy (or kid) with the illegally (or legally) purchased firearm finally find his way to my town?
This is the world of constant, low-grade terror that Americans inhabit daily, and it’s one that has been constructed primarily by the right-wing justices of the Roberts Court. It started with the 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which five justices voted to overturn a century’s worth of precedent regarding the Second Amendment, and has continued through this past June, when the Court struck down a Hawaii law prohibiting people from bringing guns onto private property that is open to the public unless they have consent from the property owner.
This record, as the great Supreme Court analyst Linda Greenhouse wrote, reflects not only a failure of constitutional interpretation, but “a failure of democracy.” Again and again, Americans have said by clear majorities that they want commonsense gun restrictions; again and again, their elected representatives have passed those restrictions; again and again, the Supreme Court has struck them down.
That’s bad enough. What’s worse is that this undermining of public safety is playing out against the backdrop of a political movement, and a presidential administration, defined by its reliance on threats and intimidation. From Donald Trump’s first run for the White House in 2015, he has stoked violence, he has glorified it, he has justified it, and when all else has failed, he has pardoned it. He has persisted even after being a target of violence multiple times himself, coming within inches of being assassinated.
What does this mean for the Court? Clearly it cannot weigh day-to-day politics in issuing its rulings, but it’s worth asking whether at least some of the justices are affected by the climate of fear and violence that the president and many of his followers have cultivated. It’s not outlandish to imagine they are: After all, political violence distorts the functioning of government at all levels, as my colleague Maya Kornberg has written. Republican politicians have admitted as much in recent years, saying they are “scared shitless” by threats from Trump supporters, and that in some cases their votes may have been swayed by that fear. (North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis received “credible death threats” simply for considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for Defense Secretary, according to Vanity Fair, which pointed out that Tillis eventually provided the 50th vote to confirm Hegseth.)
You might think that Trump’s penchant for targeting the federal judiciary would be the wake-up call the Supreme Court needs. Certainly lower federal judges are confronted daily with the dangers of Trump’s attacks, which he levels whenever they rule against him. Last year he referred to judges as “lunatics” and “monsters.” No surprise, then, that in the last four years alone, serious threats against federal judges have increased by 78 percent. As one Reagan appointee told 60 Minutes in March, “I’ve been at this for 44 years. I have never encountered the hostility toward the judiciary that has existed in this country in the, the last year.”
And yet the Court, usually in the form of Chief Justice John Roberts, has offered only the mildest rebukes of this dangerous behavior. If anything, the justices have made matters worse by their reliance on the shadow docket: As NBC News reported last year, many federal judges are concerned that when the Court reverses without explanation a lower court decision that went against Trump, it sends a signal that the rest of the judiciary is trying to undermine the presidency and emboldens those who would go further than simply tweeting angry messages at judges.
So: You will never hear me question anyone’s desire to be safe from violence, but you may hear me snort when the most powerful officials in our government refuse to let the American people take reasonable measures to protect themselves, and then come hat in hand asking us, the taxpayers who pay their irreducible salaries, to ensure that they are protected from the violence they have helped unleash on the rest of us.
What I’m Reading
It’s not court-related but it’s been on my mind a lot the last few days: the sudden and devastating death of Glen Hansard, the wonderful Irish singer and songwriter who made his name with the film Once and devoted his life to making other people’s lives better. What a loss.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: The Supreme Court is deeply, dangerously unpopular. The latest Gallup poll is brutal, thanks to increasing Republican unhappiness.
In The New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen struggles to understand modern liberals’ avoidance of natural law. While it “has been contested throughout our history,” she writes, “over the long haul, liberals have fared well in reading the Constitution in light of the higher principles of fundamental justice.”
Over at the National Constitution Center, there’s a powerful catalog of reactions to the Declaration of Independence by Black Americans, who were “the first to interpret the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ as a statement of individual equality and have employed it most often and most eloquently over the past 250 years to advance liberty and equality for all Americans.”
And one more on the Declaration, which was signed 250 years ago on Sunday, August 2 (July 4 is the date that Congress voted to adopt the Declaration): this by Laura K. Field in The Bulwark, about how the intellectual leaders of the MAGA movement distort the meaning of our foundational document.
IMAGE: Matt Jeacock/Getty