The WSJ Editorial Board is weaponizing credible threats against the justices to shield a Court that dismantled its own legitimacy and now asks Congress to pay for the security the consequences require.
The threats are real. Justice Barrett’s home was swatted this year. A man tried to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh in his home in 2022. Threats against judges have more than tripled in the last decade, Roberts reported. The Court needs more security. The $210 million budget request, the six additional agents per justice, the twenty-five more officers, the command post — these are not manufactured needs. Justices should not require bulletproof vests. A twelve-year-old should not have to be told why.
The Editorial Board is correct about the threats. It is dishonest about their causes.
The editorial names Senator Schumer’s 2020 “whirlwind” remark and Senator Whitehouse’s sustained ethics investigations as the primary engines of the danger. President Trump’s personal attacks on Justices Barrett and Gorsuch after they ruled against his tariff policy rate a single concessive clause — “might trigger some MAGA lunatic” — before the editorial pivots back to Democrats. This is what the editorial board does: it identifies a genuine problem, then sorts the blame into approved and unapproved categories, assigning causal weight by coalition rather than by evidence.
What the editorial does not name: the Court’s own role in the legitimacy crisis that feeds the threat environment.
The Editorial Board does not mention Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), in which a five-justice majority ended a constitutional right fifty years old, over a dissent that documented the majority’s own stare decisis criteria would equally justify overruling decisions on contraceptives, same-sex intimacy, and same-sex marriage. It does not mention New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), which replaced a longstanding regulatory framework with a history-and-tradition test whose contours the lower courts are still fighting over. It does not mention the shadow-docket expansion the Roberts Court has used with increasing frequency and consequence, documented by Vladeck’s work as unprecedented in scope. It does not mention the ethics record: the undisclosed gifts documented by ProPublica, the code of conduct with no external enforcement mechanism, adopted only after sustained public pressure forced it, the pattern of recusal decisions that the justices themselves declined to explain on the record.
Each of these is a choice the Court made. Each contributed to the Court’s transformation into a political institution wearing robes. The Editorial Board wants the security funding — rightly — while pretending the institution’s own conduct has no connection to the environment in which threats flourish.
Justice Kagan told lawmakers that security was minimal when she joined the Court in 2010. Justice Barrett said that when she clerked for Scalia, the justices did not have twenty-four-hour protection and did not need it. The difference between 2010 and 2026 is not solely a function of general societal violence, though that is the editorial’s preferred frame. It is a function of a Court that, in the intervening years, chose to decide the most politically charged questions in the most aggressive possible posture — overruling precedent, discarding frameworks the working bar had relied on for decades, and doing so through procedural shortcuts that bypassed the ordinary deliberative mechanisms designed to build public acceptance for difficult outcomes.
The price of politicizing the Court, the editorial’s headline reads. Yes. But the Court did not arrive at this moment because Chuck Schumer made a heated remark in 2020 or because Sheldon Whitehouse filed oversight requests. The Court arrived at this moment because it made itself into an instrument of political outcomes, and the political system responded accordingly. The editorial wants Congress to pay for the security that the consequences of the Court’s own choices now require, while blaming everyone except the institution and its doctrinal record for the need.
A justice killed would be a national catastrophe, as the editorial warns. But the way to prevent that catastrophe is not to pretend the Court is a passive victim of external political forces. It is to name what the Court has done, to hold it accountable for the legitimacy it has spent, and to fund the security its justices require while the institution begins the work of earning back what its doctrinal choices cost it. The Editorial Board supports the first two. It does not support the third.