When the Supreme Court Itself Becomes a Target: What Rising Threats Mean for a Broken Institution

Two Supreme Court justices went to Capitol Hill this week to talk about something the court hasn't done in seven years: ask Congress for money to protect themselves. Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Amy Coney Barrett described threats so serious that Barrett's 12-year-old son saw a bulletproof vest in his mother's bedroom. Her home was swatted, a fake emergency call that could have ended in tragedy if her security detail hadn't been there.

The story here isn't hard to understand. Public figures get threats. Federal judges face real danger. The court needs security, and security costs money. That's legitimate.

But there's something darker underneath this reporting, and both justices hinted at it without quite saying it aloud.

Why the Court Has Lost the Room

The Supreme Court used to be different. Ten years ago, before Justice Antonin Scalia died, the justices basically had no security at all. They drove their own cars. They went to movies. They shopped at supermarkets like regular people. Congress had to shame them into it: "You have less security than the director of the Office of Personnel Management," lawmakers told them. "You have to do better."

That's not a small thing. The Court's lack of security used to reflect something real about American democracy, a sense that the justices, however powerful, were still part of the country they governed. They lived among us.

Now they need bulletproof vests and full-time protection details. Their families get threats. People know where they live.

The question nobody on Capitol Hill asked Tuesday is the one that matters: Why? Why has the threat level risen so dramatically? Why do Americans, tens of millions of them, now see the Supreme Court not as the highest court in the land but as a political weapon?

The answer is in the institution itself.

An Institution Designed to Avoid Accountability

The Supreme Court is the only branch of government with no term limits. No binding ethics code. No meaningful accountability to anyone. A justice can sit for life. A justice caught in a conflict of interest has no obligation to recuse. A justice's financial disclosures are laughably loose compared to what Congress requires of itself. And there is no mechanism, none, to overturn bad precedent short of a constitutional amendment or waiting for a justice to die.

This structure made sense in 1789. It does not make sense now. And Americans know it.

When the Court overturns 50 years of precedent on abortion with a leaked draft. When it guts voting rights protections. When it sides with corporate donors over workers. When justices attend fundraisers for the very causes they rule on. When ethics rules that apply to every other judge don't apply to them. When there's no way to fix it except to wait.

People get angry. Angry people do dangerous things.

The threats against the justices are real and wrong and criminal. But they didn't come from nowhere. They came from a Court that has lost public trust because it's structured to be untrustworthy.

What Needs to Change

Give the justices the security they need. That's table stakes. But also fix the institution.

NPR reported that the Court's $207 million budget request is less than one-tenth of one percent of the entire federal budget. Pay it. Protect them.

But the real fix is structural. Move to 18-year term limits so no single president can reshape the Court for a generation. Impose a binding ethics code with actual teeth, the same kind every other judge lives by. Expand the Court to 18 seats to reflect the number of circuit courts and break the current ideological lockdown. Require a supermajority to overturn precedent so the Court can't be used as a tool to undo decades of settled law on a party-line vote.

These changes won't eliminate threats. But they might rebuild something the Court has lost: the belief that it works for the country, not for power.

That's when people stop feeling like they need to resort to threats. That's when the justices can go to movies again.