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Civitas Outlook
Topic
Politics
Published on
Jul 15, 2026
Contributors
John Yoo
The Swearing-in Ceremony of the Honorable Amy Coney Barrett. Wikimedia Commons.

Barrett and Kagan’s Safety Plea Exposes the Left’s War on the Supreme Court

Contributors
John Yoo
John Yoo
Senior Research Fellow
John Yoo
Summary
Supreme Court requests $14.6M in extra security funding as threats against justices surge 38% this year.

Summary
Supreme Court requests $14.6M in extra security funding as threats against justices surge 38% this year.

Listen to this article

"Maybe I lack imagination, but 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," Justice Amy Coney Barrett told Congress on Monday.

Justice Barrett was explaining in vivid terms why the Supreme Court had requested an additional $14.6 million, as part of its $228 million budget request, for enhanced security.

Her fellow witness, Justice Elena Kagan, observed that threats against the Supreme Court had risen 38% this year. Justice Barrett herself had suffered a "swatting" attack earlier this year, in which someone falsely reported an armed shooter at her house. More alarmingly, an assassin attempted to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh after the 2022 leak of the court’s Dobbs opinion, which overturned Roe v. Wade and its creation of a constitutional right to abortion.

While the justices are often willing to write hundreds of pages setting out their opinions on constitutional law, they left unanswered the question of why threats have risen so sharply.

Read the full article on Fox News.

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