By John Kruzel and Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON, July 14 (Reuters) – Justice Amy Coney Barrett laid out in personal terms on Tuesday the reasons she said Congress should approve a roughly 10% annual budget increase for the U.S. Supreme Court to bolster security, telling lawmakers about threats that she and her family have recently faced.
The appearance by Barrett, along with Justice Elena Kagan before the appropriations subcommittee of the House of Representatives, was the first by sitting justices before Congress since 2019, excluding Senate confirmation hearings for nominees.
The Supreme Court Police Department expects a “substantial 38% annual increase in threats this year, which follows a 25% increase last year,” Kagan told lawmakers in an opening statement.
“For some of us, those threats have come very close, and all of us live with the knowledge that they may again materialize,” she said.
A BULLETPROOF VEST AND ‘SWATTING’ INCIDENT
Barrett told lawmakers about some of the personal threats she and her family have encountered, emphasizing how they have affected her children.
She said that when threats intensified after the leak in 2022 of a draft of the court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that guaranteed the right to abortion nationwide, her security detail sent her home with a bulletproof vest, prompting her then 12-year-old son to ask what it was.
“I didn’t expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one.”
Barrett also recounted being the target of a “swatting” incident roughly six weeks ago, during which officers responded to a false report alleging gunshots and raised voices coming from her home.
In her first public comments on the matter, she said one of her teenage sons opened the door to leave the house and was confronted by a large police presence outside. The justice said she was grateful that Supreme Court police were stationed outside her residence because they were able to intercept responding local officers and explain that the emergency report was fraudulent.
Numerous federal judges have also received an unsolicited pizza delivered to their homes in the name of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’ son, who was fatally shot in 2020 by a disgruntled lawyer who went to her New Jersey home.
“Many of us, me included, have received threatening, anonymous deliveries designed to intimidate and harass us,” Barrett said.
“I think the message on these deliveries being sent in his name is clear,” Barrett added.
Kagan and Barrett were also due to testify before a Senate subcommittee later on Tuesday.
Two weeks ago the Supreme Court ended a nine-month term highlighted by legal disputes involving President Donald Trump and his administration. The court has backed major elements of Trump’s expansive use of executive authority.
The court’s 6-3 conservative majority has reshaped U.S. law with landmark rulings on abortion, presidential power and other contentious issues, while facing sustained ethics scrutiny and a decline in public approval.
RISING THREATS AGAINST FEDERAL JUDGES
According to data from the U.S. Marshals Service, nearly 400 judges faced threats last year and 276 have been targeted this year as of July 1.
Barrett, one of Trump’s three conservative appointees, and Kagan, one of three liberal justices, defended the court’s nearly $230 million request for the next fiscal year, a roughly 10% increase from this year.
More than $14 million would go toward expanding the Supreme Court Police Department’s “protective activities for justices’ residences and families,” according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the judiciary’s administrative arm.
The court asks Congress for money every year to support its operations but the justices don’t always appear in person to testify about these requests.
‘IT’S GOT TO STOP’
In March, Chief Justice John Roberts said hostility directed in personal terms at judges is “dangerous and it’s got to stop,” commenting just days after Trump issued a social media broadside against judges who ruled against him and his administration.
Roberts’ remarks followed his 2024 end-of-year report highlighting “a significant uptick in identified threats at all levels of the judiciary” over recent years.
In one of the most high-profile incidents, a California resident appeared near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home in 2022 armed with a handgun. Sophie Roske pleaded guilty to attempted assassination and was sentenced last year to eight years in federal prison.
Since 2019, the conservative majority has overturned precedents long cherished by American liberals, including the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had recognized a constitutional right to abortion.
Amid ethics scrutiny, the Supreme Court in 2023 adopted its first code of conduct, though critics said it lacked meaningful enforcement because it left recusal decisions to the justices themselves and created no enforcement mechanism.
Kagan reiterated on Tuesday her openness to the creation of a judicial panel to monitor justices’ compliance with the court’s ethics code, saying the court “should work hard” to figure out an enforcement system.
Questions have persisted over the conduct of some justices, including Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas.
Alito told the New York Times that an upside-down U.S. flag displayed outside one of his homes after the 2020 election was placed there by his wife during a dispute with a neighbor over a sign on the neighbor’s lawn critical of then-President Trump.
The inverted flag became a symbol of protest by Trump supporters as he sought to overturn his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden with false claims of widespread voting fraud.
Thomas has defended his not disclosing luxury trips paid for by Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, saying he believed they qualified as exempt “personal hospitality,” and has described the omission of a real estate transaction involving Crow from disclosure forms as inadvertent.
(Reporting by John Kruzel and Andrew Chung; Editing by Amy Stevens and Howard Goller)
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