Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett testify before the House Appropriations Committee on Capitol Hill on July 14, 2026 in Washington, DC.
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On Tuesday, the Supreme Court did something it hasn’t done in seven years. He sent two judges to Capitol Hill to testify about the court’s budget request for the coming year. The budget has risen sharply in recent years due to an equally dramatic increase in the number and intensity of threats to the safety of judges.
Judge Elena Kagan, appointed by President Obama, and Judge Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by President Trump, were appointed to represent the court.
As Kagan pointed out in her testimony, it was Republican Darrell Issa and Democrat Elijah Cummings who insisted the court beef up security a decade ago after Justice Antonin Scalia died in his sleep while hunting and there were no guards nearby to respond quickly.
“They said something to the effect that we think you’re crazy, you know you have less security than the director of the Office of Personnel Management,” she recounted the congressmen telling the court, “and we think you need to do better.”
Before this, judges had virtually no security. They drove their own cars to work; went to the cinema and shopped in supermarkets unaccompanied, and also traveled independently. And frankly, they liked it because safety is a personal intervention.
However, the court has made major changes in recent years, including continually expanding the size of the judicial police force to provide ongoing protection to judges and their homes, and funding additional cybersecurity measures.
And yet, as Justice Kagan noted, the Court’s budget request of $207 million is less than one tenth of one percent of the entire federal budget.
On Tuesday, the judges detailed how the growing threats have affected their lives. Judge Barrett has two heartbreaking stories to tell. The first was the day she brought home the bulletproof vest.
“My 12-year-old son stood in my bedroom doorway and wanted to know what it was,” she said, “and I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t expect that performing this service would put me in the position of explaining to my children what body armor is and why I should wear it.”
She also described how just six weeks ago her home was shot at and local police responded to a fake 911 call. The local police might have stormed her house if her own security had not prevented this.
Indeed, the threats have deeply affected judges across America. After the 20-year-old son of U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas was killed by a gunman trying to kill her, multiple federal judges reported receiving packages bearing her slain son’s name. These threats, Judge Barrett testified, “are intended to intimidate and harass.”
Sen. Jack Reed (D-I.) asked questions about President Trump’s violent response to unfavorable rulings in tariff and birthright citizenship cases, and whether Trump’s numerous insults to the court could play a role in jeopardizing the safety of some judges. Kagan had a two-part answer.
“Criticism is fair game. I mean, go for it. You know, life in a big city is such that you’re exposed to all sorts of criticism. But intimidation is something else entirely. And when politicians of any stripe try to intimidate judges,” she said, “that’s where we’ve really crossed the line.”
The hearings were not limited to security issues. Congresswoman Rosa De Lauro (D-Conn.) asked about the Supreme Court’s ethics requirements, noting that members of Congress and executive branch officials are limited to gifts under $50, while the Supreme Court has no such limit.
She supports a bill that would impose the same gift restrictions on the Supreme Court as on Congress. And she called for a mechanism to enforce ethics rules adopted by the Supreme Court itself.
But Justice Kagan, who said she supported an enforcement mechanism, added that creating such a system is “difficult.” After all, she noted, “you wouldn’t want either the President or Congress” to impose a system on the court, because that could very well lead to a compromise of the independence of the judiciary.
One idea that Kagan seemed to like was creating a panel of distinguished retired judges to enforce the court’s code of ethics. But Judge Barrett seemed unconvinced.
“Who chooses the judges? How is the commission formed? There’s just a lot of complexity,” she said. The disagreement between them was, if anything, an illustration of how difficult it was to get the court to finally agree on even the relatively porous code of ethics it voluntarily adopted in 2023.
The judges were also questioned about the emergency docket, which critics have dubbed the “shadow docket.” These cases were extremely rare before the Trump administration.
The critical difference between an emergency docket and a so-called substantive docket is that emergency appeals often bypass the lower courts, allowing the higher court to make decisions without full instruction and reasoning and inevitably without much, if any, explanation.
Critics, including Justice Kagan, have often criticized these unsigned and unexplained emergency orders for making it difficult for lower courts to understand what the law is. Some actually accused the court of suggesting that the Trump administration should treat the case as a fast-track to approving the policy.
In response to a question from Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Kagan noted that part of the reason for the court’s increased use of emergency cases is due to the fact that “we’ve provided a number of these documents… And when people know that help is available, there are a lot of smart lawyers in the world who will say, ‘Why don’t we try this?’ In other words, the court’s own behavior may have caused the existing problem to metastasize.