The High Court grapples with a new era of political violence

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Supreme Court justices don't often appear before Congress after they've gone through the confirmation process. (And as contentious as those confirmation hearings get sometimes, who can blame them?)

But last week, Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett testified before both House and Senate subcommittees - the first time in seven years that sitting justices have given public congressional testimony. The important subject for this rare visit? Security.

Kagan, nominated to the court by President Barack Obama, and Barrett, chosen by President Donald Trump, teamed up to be the face of the Supreme Court's request for $921 million in security funding for the coming fiscal year. That's $29 million more than allotted last year, $15 million of which would go to making members of the Supreme Court Police available as personal protection details for justices and their families.

That both a liberal and a conservative justice would visit Congress to pitch this request reflects both bipartisan concern about political violence - Kagan says threats against justices increased 25 percent in 2025 and are expected to climb 38 percent this year - and the bipartisan nature of those threats.

Last year, Nicholas Roske pleaded guilty to attempting to assassinate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, a Trump nominee. In an online message, Roske talked about his anger at "the thought of Roe v. Wade and gay marriage both being repealed."

U.S. District Judge Esther Salas's son was murdered and her husband seriously wounded by a man whom Salas said was found to have "a manila folder with a workup on Justice Sonia Sotomayor." The shooter, Roy Den Hollander, was an avid Trump supporter and self-described "anti-feminist."

For most of its history, the Supreme Court has had the least visibility of the branches of government and, as a result, has required the least security. G. Edward White, a law professor at the University of Virginia and editor of the Journal of Supreme Court History, recalls the security as minimal at the Supreme Court during his 1971 clerkship with then-Chief Justice Earl Warren.

"There was no visible security," White told the Early Brief. "The public entering the court wasn't screened and nobody who was actually participating in an oral argument was screened."

But threats against Supreme Court justices have increased significantly in the last decade - along with their security details - with SCOTUSBlog editor and former Trump DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur noting that "the security needs of the court actually far more track the overall polarization of voters than it does anything about the court."

And with the Supreme Court frequently being called upon to wade into America's increasingly polarized waters, the court has become a regular political bogeyman for both Democrats and Republicans - and especially for Trump, who has repeatedly attacked both the court as a whole and individual justices, including his own nominees.

Isgur worries all of this will affect jurists' willingness to serve on the Supreme Court.

"These justices don't change what cases they're taking or which way they're voting, because the threats are coming from both sides … the effect of the threats is actually to deter future people from taking these jobs," said Isgur, who personally knows one judge who was on the shortlist for a vacancy who told Isgur he worried about the impact taking a Supreme Court justiceship would have on his young family.

Because the threats to the Supreme Court appear to be largely borne out of a broader cultural polarization, justices aren't alone in facing heightened threats.

Trump has been the target of multiple assassination attempts just in the last two years. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) was the target of a far-right kidnapping plot in 2020. Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed in their home last year by a shooter who was targeting state Democratic lawmakers. Even non-famous election workers and volunteers are facing unprecedented threats and bullying. America has entered a new era of divisive political rhetoric and political violence, a reality with which everyone at every level of U.S. politics is now having to contend.

A report released earlier this year by the Public Service Alliance, a nonpartisan group focused on government worker safety, found federal campaigns and committees spent more than five times as much on security in the 2023-2024 campaign cycle as in the 2015-2016 cycle.

Based on spending trends and without a steep drop in political violence, security will be a major expenditure in the 2028 cycle as well - especially since many of the politicians considered likely candidates are already dealing with threats and attempts on their lives.

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