Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan appeared before a House subcommittee today to testify about the surge in violent threats against federal judges and the Supreme Court, the first time sitting justices have given this kind of testimony to Congress since 2019. The justices are asking Congress for $228.4 million in security funding for fiscal year 2027, up from $207.8 million this year. Supreme Court Police have documented a 38 percent projected increase in threats in 2026, on top of a 25 percent jump in 2025, and the U.S. Marshals Service has opened 512 threat investigations across the federal judiciary so far this year, against 807 for all of last year. Those are not abstract numbers. Justice Barrett’s own account of what her family has endured is the clearest explanation I have heard for why the right to keep and bear arms is not a constitutional abstraction but a lived necessity.
What Justice Barrett Told Congress
Barrett described being sent home with a bulletproof vest during the period when threats intensified after the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), which overturned Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). She recalled her twelve-year-old son finding the vest and asking what it was. Roughly six weeks before her testimony, she said, she was the target of a swatting incident: a false report of gunshots sent police cars swarming her street while one of her teenage sons was walking out the door. Supreme Court Police intervened before local officers entered the home.
Barrett also described threatening anonymous deliveries sent in the name of Daniel Anderl, the twenty-year-old son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas who was murdered in 2020 by a self-described anti-feminist attorney, Roy Den Hollander, who came to Judge Salas’s home intending to kill her. Anderl opened the door and was shot; Judge Salas’s husband, attorney Mark Anderl, was seriously wounded. Invoking that name in threats against sitting justices is not subtle.
“Many of us, me included, have received threatening anonymous deliveries designed to intimidate and harass us. They are often sent in the name of Judge Salas’s son… who was killed by a disgruntled lawyer who showed up at Judge Salas’s home intending to kill her.” — Justice Amy Coney Barrett
A One-Way Ratchet
Here is what I have argued for years and what this testimony confirms: this threat environment runs almost entirely in one direction. It was outside Justice Kavanaugh’s home in 2022, during the Bruen deliberations, that Nicholas Roske was arrested and later sentenced to 97 months in federal prison for plotting to assassinate a sitting justice. It was not outside the homes of the Court’s liberal wing that armed protesters gathered after the Dobbs leak, protests then-Attorney General Merrick Garland characterized as ordinary, lawful demonstration activity. The six justices appointed by Republican presidents require round-the-clock protection and, apparently, body armor. Their colleagues do not carry that burden, because no one is trying to kill them.
The Marbled Halls, and the Point They Prove
Justice Thomas made this same argument years before any of this escalated, dissenting from the Court’s 2017 denial of certiorari in Peruta v. California, cert. denied, 582 U.S. ___ (2017), joined by Justice Gorsuch:
“For those of us who work in marbled halls, guarded constantly by a vigilant and dedicated police force, the guarantees of the Second Amendment might seem antiquated and superfluous. But the Framers made a clear choice: They reserved to all Americans the right to bear arms for self-defense.”
Nine years later, the justices themselves are living proof of that dissent’s premise. What protects Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas is not a slogan. It is armed men and women standing between them and people who mean them harm. That is the entire theory of the Second Amendment, applied to the people who write its case law.
Barrett, Heller, and the Question Graham Asked
It is worth remembering how Barrett handled this subject at her 2020 confirmation hearing, when the late Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether owning a gun would affect her ability to rule impartially in Second Amendment cases. She answered that she and her husband do own a gun, that she could rule fairly regardless, and that revisiting District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), would require a proper case working its way through the courts before the Court could even consider it — not a justice’s personal preference imposed by fiat. That answer has held up. Barrett has since joined the majorities in Bruen, United States v. Rahimi, 602 U.S. 680 (2024), United States v. Hemani, 608 U.S. ___ (2026), and Wolford v. Lopez, 609 U.S. ___ (2026), building a record squarely protective of the individual right to keep and bear arms. The justices under the most serious threat are the same justices who have done the most, in my read, to vindicate the constitutional right that makes self-defense possible for the rest of us.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.