The Wall Street Journal editorial board is using the justices’ security testimony to argue for less oversight of the Court.
That is the editorial’s actual argument. It is not the argument the editorial claims to be making.
The Board’s July 14 piece reports that Justices Kagan and Barrett testified before Congress about rising threats and requested $210 million for the Court’s fiscal 2027 budget, including roughly $19 million more for security. The piece reports Barrett’s swatting attack this year, the threatening deliveries sent in the name of Daniel Anderl — the son of federal Judge Esther Salas, shot in 2020 at the family’s home by a gunman posing as a delivery driver — the 2022 assassination attempt on Justice Kavanaugh at his home, the bulletproof vests the justices have been issued. Chief Justice Roberts’ 2024 year-end report, the piece notes, documented that threats against judges had more than tripled in the last decade. The Court’s police force is projecting a 38 percent threat increase this year on top of a 25 percent increase last year.
These are documented facts. The security funding request deserves support. The piece’s first eight paragraphs build a case for that support on evidence any reader can evaluate.
Then the editorial makes its move.
“The threats reflect a larger societal trend of violence, but they are also the result of politicians who politicize the Court,” the Board writes. It spends one sentence acknowledging that Trump’s personal attacks on Barrett and Gorsuch after they ruled against his tariff policy “might trigger some MAGA lunatic.” It then spends three paragraphs assigning the larger fault to Democrats: Schumer’s 2020 speech about Kavanaugh and Gorsuch (“released the whirlwind and you will pay the price”), Whitehouse’s investigations of undisclosed gifts and ethics failures (“a personal mission”), and “the social-media left.”
“The larger fault in recent years lies with Democrats,” the Board writes. That is the editorial’s load-bearing sentence. It is the sentence the security testimony was brought in to support.
The editorial does not mention the Court’s ethics record. It does not mention the undisclosed gifts. It does not mention the shadow-docket order in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson that allowed Texas SB 8 to ban most abortions before Dobbs without merits briefing or oral argument. It does not mention the pattern of rulings that favor concentrated power — the documented pattern, not the partisan characterization. It treats the Court as a passive recipient of political attacks, not as an institution whose own decisions have produced the public anger the editorial attributes to Democratic rhetoric.
This is the institutional-deference loophole. The institution invokes threats to its members as an argument against the scrutiny of its institutional failures. The two are not the same thing. The Board makes them the same thing.
Whitehouse’s investigations were oversight of documented ethics failures — the same ethics record that produced the ProPublica reporting no Court defender has successfully impeached. Schumer’s 2020 speech, whatever one thinks of its rhetoric, was political speech about the consequences of confirmation — the kind of speech every senator in every confirmation hearing has made. The Board’s word is “smearing.” The dictionary word for what Whitehouse did is “oversight.” Whether Whitehouse’s investigation crossed into grandstanding is a legitimate question — but the editorial does not engage that question. It substitutes one word for another and treats the substitution as analysis.
The editorial warns against “politicizing the Court.” It then politicizes the Court — assigning asymmetric blame for threats to the Court’s political critics while excusing its political allies from the same scrutiny. The Board acknowledges Trump’s direct attacks on sitting justices in one sentence and treats that acknowledgment as sufficient. It is not sufficient. A piece that assigns “the larger fault” to one party’s rhetoric while acknowledging the other party’s comparable rhetoric in a subordinate clause is not analyzing the threat environment. It is deploying the threat environment.
The editorial also elides the institutional decisions that produced public anger. The shadow-docket order in Jackson — that is documented. The ethics failures involving undisclosed gifts from wealthy benefactors — that is documented. The pattern of rulings that favor concentrated power — Trump v. United States on presidential immunity, Loper Bright on Chevron deference, the shadow-docket orders on voting restrictions — is documented, over multiple terms, in the opinion record. These institutional decisions are the documented source of public anger toward the Court. The editorial does not engage any of them. It attributes the anger to rhetoric rather than to the institutional record that produced it.
The Board’s argument, stripped to its structure, is this: the justices face genuine physical threats; those threats are primarily the fault of Democratic rhetoric and oversight; therefore, the Court should be insulated from that rhetoric and oversight. The security funding request is the instrument. The partisan blame assignment is the argument. The insulation from accountability is the objective.
The Board does not argue for better security for federal judges — hundreds of whom have faced threats this year, with no national editorial campaign in their defense. The Board argues for insulating the Court from the specific scrutiny that the Court’s institutional record demands.
The Court faces two threats. One is physical — the swatting, the assassination attempt, the threatening deliveries, the bulletproof vests that Barrett said were difficult to explain to her twelve-year-old son. The security funding request addresses that threat. It deserves support.
The other threat is institutional — the Court’s own institutional record, the ethics failures, the shadow-docket orders, the pattern of rulings, the revolving door between the Court and the conservative legal movement. That threat cannot be addressed with bulletproof vests or command posts. It can only be addressed with the oversight, transparency, and accountability the Board dismisses as incitement.
The Board conflates the two. It uses the physical threat to argue against the institutional accountability that the Court’s own record demands. That conflation is the editorial’s actual work. The security testimony is the instrument.
The closing warning — “the price for the country will be far greater if a Justice is killed” — is true. It is also an argument the Board could make without assigning asymmetric partisan blame, without dismissing congressional oversight as “smearing,” and without treating the Court’s institutional accountability as a threat to be managed rather than a constitutional obligation to be met. The Board chose not to make that argument. It chose the partisan assignment. The choice reveals the argument.
The Court’s physical security needs bipartisan support and receives it. The Court’s institutional integrity depends on the scrutiny the Board wants to reduce. A judiciary that conflates its institutional legitimacy with insulation from accountability has confused the source of its authority. Public trust is not produced by fewer eyes on the institution. It is produced by the institution earning the trust the eyes are checking for.