Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett testified before the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on July 14 to ask for a nearly $20 million increase in security after a landmark ruling session and amid rising political threats. Yet no one participating in the hearing seemed to acknowledge that the left is primarily to blame for the increase of such threats.
During the hearing, the justices and subcommittee members frequently referenced startling statistics on political violence towards judges across the United States. Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2024 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary noted that threats against judges across the U.S. have tripled in the past decade, and the U.S. Marshals Service investigated more than 1,000 threats against judges in the past five years.
“Those statistics sound abstract, but being on the receiving end of them is not,” Justice Barrett said. She recalled to the House having to wear a bulletproof vest on her way home after defending the Dobbs decision in 2024 and the disturbance that caused to her family. “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,” she said.
Barrett faced a recent swatting attack last month when police responded to a call claiming that gunshots were going off in the justice’s home. “One of my teenage sons opened the door … and saw [that] our street was full of police cars,” she testified before the House. “I was very grateful that I had Supreme Court police outside my home because they were able to stop and explain to the county police that it had been a false alarm.”
Justice Kagan and blue-haired leftist Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., expressed deep sympathy to Barrett and all the Supreme Court Justices for the “bipartisan” terror they all face.
“This poses a danger not only to public officials but to the institution of democracy as a whole,” DeLauro exclaimed.
Yet, while the court and DeLauro would love to keep the blame for the rise in political attacks off the left, the evidence makes it clear that political violence is not merely a “both sides” issue. The events of recent months and years have made it clear that political violence is particularly a problem on the left. For example, in addition to essentially justifying assassination attempts by ceaselessly smearing Trump and conservatives as Nazis, the left has also relentlessly stoked violence against conservative justices on the Supreme Court.
In 2020, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh that they “released the whirlwind” and would “pay the price” if they overturned Roe v. Wade. In the decade and a half since then, a true “whirlwind” of violence has attacked conservative Justices. Left-wing anarchists harassed Gorsuch and Kavanaugh at their homes to intimidate them into changing their position on the Dobbs case. Then, the pro-abortion Supreme Court Justices stalled the release of the official ruling on the case, forcing the conservative justices to fear assassination for days under the leaked draft opinion. The Dobbs violence reached a peak with a failed assassination attempt on Justice Kavanaugh.
Last year, a Michigan Democrat candidate “fantasized” about chucking beers at Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh. This year, Justice Clarence Thomas was forced to deliver his remarks at an American University event virtually because of a security risk. “I wanted to make sure I didn’t endanger anyone by my mere presence,” he told the college students.
Recent words by Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., mirror the tone of Schumer’s famous threat. Warnock accused the conservative Callais majority, which smacked down race-based gerrymandering, of “committ[ing] violence against the ways in which ordinary people can have a voice in our system.”
Besides justices, America’s major conservative voices have faced assassination attempts by liberal bad actors. July 13 was the second anniversary of the Bulter assassination attempt on President Donald Trump, and last week, the preliminary hearings began for Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson.
As long as government actors, lawmakers, politicians, and even those on the right continue to paint political violence as a “both sides” issue instead of calling it what it is — the natural trajectory of leftist ideology — the longer it will continue. As Rep. Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, said during the hearing, “reasonable people can disagree, and unreasonable people resort to violence.”
