Two Supreme Court Justices will be on Capitol Hill next week to beg for cash for an increase in security needs.

Politico reported on Tuesday that Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan would appear before the House and Senate Appropriations Committees next week, requesting further funds for their security. The court has produced slick new videos showing off its security force as a kind of smaller secret service outfit with its own new tagline: “The highest court. A higher calling.”

"[W]ith little fanfare, the size of the Supreme Court’s police force has begun mushrooming. For years, the force sat at fewer than 200 officers, but now officials are aiming to more than double the ranks of the agents and officers who protect the justices and the Supreme Court’s building," the report said.

The push is likely coming from the increased threats to justices amid some of President Donald Trump's more public legal battles. Trump has faced off against state and federal courts, and last week the Court denied his request to review the verdict in a defamation case against him. The Court also struck down his executive order that would have ended birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

Trump lashed out at the conservative court on Truth Social, saying the GOP justices have "gone weak, stupid, and bad, completely violating what they ‘supposedly’ stood for."

His hasn't been the only language of attack. Speaking to the Federalist Society, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whom Trump has nominated to be his official AG, told a room full of lawyers in Nov. 2025 that the Department of Justice, indeed the whole Trump administration, is at “war” with federal district courts. He alleged “rogue activist judges” were at fault.

The U.S. Marshals Service, which oversees security for the federal judiciary, reported it investigated nearly 600 serious threats against federal judges in 2025.

So, it isn't unusual that the Supreme Court would be looking for help, too.

“The justices are averse to the intrusion into their personal lives that comes with increased security, but they are resigned to the need for it both personally and for the court as an institution,” a former court staffer told Politico.

The report assessed that the Court has never been as "central to the political system" as it has been recently. Politico described "it snarling the pre-election prosecution of Donald Trump, blocking the president’s tariffs [and] scaling back the Voting Rights Act" as a few examples.

It all comes as the Court remains largely secret to most Americans. The nine robed lawyers are never seen doing their jobs because cameras are barred from the Court. The new use of the "shadow docket" has left legal analysts questioning whether decisions they make are intended to be hidden. Even when justices read their rulings and dissents, there is no audio, much less video, and staff can't merely text colleagues with the details; a low-level news staffer grabs decisions printed on paper and races them to their bosses in the media.

In the past few years, Supreme Court approval has dropped as low as 39 percent last year and now stands at about 46 percent.

Calls for oversight and accountability for the judges persist.

"Court officials are loath to discuss the security measures being undertaken to protect the justices," the report said. "But the portrait of an institution straining to transform itself and its security apparatus comes into focus through an in-depth review of budget documents and videos posted on an officer-hiring website, as well as interviews with court insiders and little-noticed public comments by the justices."

Meanwhile, justices are complaining that the increased attention has led to drastic changes in their lives and in how they interact with the public. In some cases, the report said they must limit where they can go. It's a problem elected officials have dealt with for decades.

“We provide money for the Supreme Court,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro said in an April comment. “They’ve never come up and tell us what they’re doing with the money that we appropriate.”

Now, it appears they're en route.

The report goes on to talk about some of the security breaches that have left justices nervous. The current plan is to launch an ad campaign asking for more security staff and budget. They offer a starting salary of $86,000 with a $50,000 signing bonus if the police member signs up for 3 years of service or more.

Many MAGA Republicans exploded in anger when conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with Chief Justice John Roberts and three Democratic appointees — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — in Trump v. Barbara, which invalidated an executive order by President Donald Trump calling for an end to birthright citizenship. This wasn't the first time MAGA Republicans raged against Barrett, and an editorial by the conservative National Review calls out MAGA "abuse of" the Trump appointee.

Barrett has a decidedly conservative resumé, describing herself as an "originalist" and an admirer of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. But her willingness to occasionally buck MAGA and vote with the Democratic justices is infuriating MAGA Republicans and Trump loyalists.

"Criticism comes, rightly, with the territory of being a Supreme Court justice," the National Review editors argue in their editorial. "Hysteria shouldn't. With the conclusion of the 2025–26 Supreme Court term and Donald Trump's defeat on birthright citizenship, we have been treated to another round of abuse from right-leaning commentators directed toward Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The immediate trigger of their ire is Barrett's joining the Trump v. Barbara majority (along with Chief Justice John Roberts and, on the outcome, Justice Brett Kavanaugh) striking down Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship."

The Review editors continue, "Barrett critics also cite her majority opinion in Watson v. Republican National Committee, which allowed states to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day for up to five days later, as well as her vote, along with Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, to strike down Trump's 'emergency' global tariffs and her rulings against Trump in a few of last summer's torrent of emergency decisions on deportations."

On the MAGA far right, the conservative justice is often attacked as "Amy 'Commie' Barrett" — which is the type of rhetoric the Review is calling out.

"It's the intemperate vitriol of these attacks, and their utter lack of perspective, that appalls us," the Review editors lament. "Critics brand Barrett a traitor, a DEI hire and a left-winger who has doomed the country. They complain that she makes poor decisions because she is a woman and a mother of adopted children from Haiti. Perhaps more ominously, there is much muttering that future Republicans should fill judicial vacancies with fewer people devoted to the law and more who will be mere party apparatchiks, voting in the results-oriented fashion we traditionally associate with the liberal justices…. No, we don't always agree with her, or with the Court's decisions since her arrival in 2020 formed the current 6–3 majority."

The Review editors continue, "Nor, for that matter, do we agree every single time with any of her distinguished colleagues. The Court's cases are often hard, and its justices fallible. That's why there are nine of them."

Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected the idea of being a swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court during an appearance in Arkansas on Saturday, despite cases where she’s split from the court’s conservative majority.

Barrett, who President Donald Trump nominated to the court in 2020, spoke for an hour about her work during an event at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.

Conservatives hold a 6-3 majority on the court, but Barrett has sided with the liberal justices on several key cases over the years. But Barrett said she doesn’t view herself as a swing vote.

“I don’t like that label because it makes me sound sort of flighty,” she said during the “Building Bridges” Q&A with Crystal Bridges Board Chair Olivia Walton. “You could say a lot of things. I don’t think I’m flighty. I think independent, or just following the law, would be the way to describe it.”

Barrett said that being a judge means that sometimes she’ll decide a case where she doesn’t like the results.

“I think that’s what it means to be faithful to the law and not try to align yourself with what people want you to do on the outside,” she said.

Barrett said that “spicy” dissents or sharp splits on the court aren’t an indication that justices don’t get along. When conferencing on cases, there aren’t loud arguments and justices do things to build collegiality, she said.

“I think when you only see someone as a package of ideas, especially if some of the ideas are ones you disagree with, it’s pretty hard like them, right?” she said. “But if you put the ideas aside and get to know someone as a person, then you can relate. Then you can put those things behind so the disagreements don’t dominate the relationship.”

When asked about artificial intelligence, Barrett told Walton the court doesn’t use it “because it would be insecure.”

“You can trust that our opinions are not AI-generated,” Barrett said, though she said her husband occasionally uses it for recipes.

Barrett, who has a daughter graduating from college and a son graduating from high school this year, said she would tell graduates to seek out people with whom they disagree.

“Make sure to give them grace and see people as humans,” she said.

In a 5-4 ruling issued on Monday, August 31, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit by the National Trust for Historic Preservation — which challenged President Donald Trump's ability to proceed with construction of a White House ballroom. According to SCOTUSBlog, the majority ruled that "the plaintiff likely lacks a legal right, known as standing, to challenge the project at all." And Harvard University legal scholar Noah Feldman believes that the ruling has implications that go way beyond the ballroom itself.

The dissent found Chief Justice John Roberts in agreement with Democrat-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, while the majority consisted of GOP-appointed Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Feldman, in an op-ed for Bloomberg News, explains, "Over a dissent by Chief Justice John Roberts, who was joined by the Court's three liberals, the Court's five conservatives said that the National Trust for Historic Preservation lacked standing to challenge the ballroom being built where the East Wing of the White House used to be. The unsigned opinion raises an obvious question — if the National Trust for Historic Preservation can't challenge the destruction of a historic building, who can? — and a less obvious one: How is the White House like a crocodile?"

The Harvard legal scholar continues, "I'm not being facetious — Roberts actually does raise that second question. And the consequences of the first go beyond the narrow issue of who has the legal authority to challenge Trump's architectural imperialism. More than any other Supreme Court decision in recent memory, this one narrows the grounds for federal lawsuits by watchdog groups. It's so extreme, it goes much further to deny standing than even the late Justice Antonin Scalia did."

Scalia, Feldman notes, denied "standing" in the 1992 case Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, which "involved a challenge to an EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) regulation."

Feldman comments, "The vote that surprises me most in this case is that of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who clerked for Scalia and ordinarily takes pains to make sure the Court interprets his views correctly."

According to Feldman, the High Court's ballroom ruling is "distressing" because it makes it "harder to sue the federal government in an emergency docket case that did not benefit from full oral argument or briefing."

"Trump's desire to act like an emperor, marring the Washington cityscape with disproportionately large triumphal arches and ballrooms, is offensive both aesthetically and symbolically; these are not monuments to democracy," Feldman writes. "The Court's ballroom decision is disappointing for deeper reasons: It weakens the capacity of the judiciary to keep the president within the limits of his legal authority. In so doing, it undermines the rule of law itself."

Although the United States has its most right-wing Supreme Court in generations, President Donald Trump often lashes out at the justices — including the ones he appointed. And libertarian journalist Damon Root, in Reason, examines Trump's ongoing frustration with a High Court where GOP appointees comprise a 6-3 supermajority.

"Trump is upset for a simple reason: While the conservative legal movement has been winning big at the Court, Trump's own record is rather more mixed," Root explains in Reason. "In fact, on three key issues that clearly matter a great deal to him because he keeps bringing them up — tariffs, birthright citizenship, and voting by mail — one or more of his own appointees has ruled against him every time."

Although Democrats have won the popular vote in most of the United States' post-1980s presidential elections, Republicans have had much better luck with the High Court. Former President Barack Obama appointed two justices during his eight years in office (Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan), while Trump appointed three during his first term alone: Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch. Two-thirds of the Court consists of GOP appointees, and half of those six conservative justices are Trump appointees.

On his Truth Social platform, Trump recently accused the conservative-dominated Supreme Court of being "bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left."

"President Donald Trump dramatically reshaped the U.S. Supreme Court during his first term by appointing three new justices who then made possible a series of far-reaching decisions beloved by legal conservatives, including the narrowing of the reach of the Voting Rights Act and the total elimination of the constitutional right to abortion," Root observes. "But none of that means that Trump actually looks fondly upon the Court that he has so thoroughly remade."

According to Root, the justices who are the most favorable to Trump are Samuel Alito (appointed by former President George W. Bush) and Clarence Thomas (appointed by President George H.W. Bush). The younger Bush also appointed conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who Trump often rails against.

"What explains why Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have turned out to be more reliable votes for Trump than Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, each of whom the president himself put on the high bench?" Root argues. "The short answer is that Thomas and Alito are basically the biggest supporters of executive power on the current Court. In the tariffs case, for example, the question was whether Trump was authorized to wield a type of authority that the Constitution specifically assigned to Congress. On birthright citizenship, the question was whether an executive order could supersede the text and history of a constitutional amendment. And on voting by mail, the question was, again, whether the executive could wield power that was assigned elsewhere by the Constitution, namely, to the states and Congress."

Root continues, "In all three disputes, Thomas and Alito argued that the president was empowered to do exactly what he was trying to do, with no need to worry about the constitutional separation of powers. Trump's judicial appointees, by contrast, were unwilling to go that far three times in a row."

Joe Scarborough did not hold back Tuesday morning as he reacted to the Supreme Court's latest ruling, accusing two of the most conservative justices of being "all in" on President Donald Trump's plot to "destroy democracy."

On Monday evening, the court issued a 7-2 ruling declining to halt a lower court's order blocking Trump's plan to use the Postal Service to block certain types of mail-in ballots, part of his broader plot to seize control over the voting process from the states. The administration had been pushing to implement new rules in time for the midterms, in which Republicans are expected to get wiped out by Democrats, but now, the plan appears to be fully stalled.

Many legal experts argued that the case against Trump was fairly open-and-shut, but nonetheless, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito voted in favor of halting the lower court ruling, the latest example of the two justices going to great lengths to protect Trump's agenda.

Discussing the ruling on Tuesday's edition of Morning Joe, Scarborough dug into the ruling and its implications, reserving a specific verbal attack for Alito and Thomas.

"To have the postal service interfere. But this is, you know, we go back, the Supreme Court does some things, dragging their feet, that has been absolutely maddening over the last year,” Scarborough said, later adding, "But when it comes to these election challenges, they were 63-and-0 against Donald Trump in 2020 and, here we are, back at that 7-2 count for whenever Donald Trump steps over the line and does something that is going to completely interfere with free democratic elections. It’s usually 7-2. Of course, Alito and Thomas, perfectly fine with them destroying democracy. And yes, I just said that, if Donald Trump wants to destroy democracy, they’re all in.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, the former GOP congressman offered praise for some of the other SCOTUS judges while speaking with conservative pundit David French.

“Though, I will say Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts once again proving themselves to be conservative, the kind of conservative you and I are,” he added. “The conservative with a small c, the conservative that actually reads the Constitution, understands the Constitution, understands that states are supposed to run elections, understands that a White House is not supposed to seize voter rolls, and if states don’t give them those voter rolls, and they’re going to tell, you know, the United States Post Office how to run state elections.”

Justice Samuel Alito’s decision to remain on the Supreme Court could leave President Donald Trump with a problem conservatives had hoped to avoid if Republicans lose control of the Senate in November.

Salon’s Heather Digby Parton argued in her latest column that Alito's decision to remain on the bench while Trump still has a Republican Senate could end up giving Democrats a valuable opportunity. Should the Democrats take control of the chamber and Alito leave the court during the last two years of Trump's term, they would then have the power to decide whether his replacement is confirmed.

It has become more difficult for the Republicans to ignore that possibility as a number of the Senate races grow more competitive in the run-up to the midterm elections on Nov. 3.

In a recent interview with CBS News, Alito, who is 76, said that he had been thinking about retiring at an earlier date this year. While the Republicans were in control of both the White House and the Senate, conservative groups had openly urged both Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, who is 78, to step down so that Trump could replace them with a number of much younger conservative judges.

Alito chose otherwise.

“I think I can still make a contribution,” he told CBS chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford, continuing: “And it’s hard to give up the opportunity to do something that I think will be good for the Constitution and good for the country as long as I’m able to do it.”

Alito stated that political considerations had not influenced his decision, on the grounds that it was impossible to predict what the political landscape would be like in the future or who a president might choose to replace him.

However, Parton pointed out that the timing might turn out to be important.

The Republicans now have the Senate with a vote total of 53 to 47, which means Trump can send his Supreme Court nominees to a majority that supports him. In order to take control of the Senate, the Democrats will need a net gain of four seats, and in several states where the Republican Party was previously considered to have a safe majority, the races have become more competitive.

A Democratic Senate that takes office in January would make it very difficult for Trump to replace Alito with another conservative justice who can be counted on. The Senate leaders have broad powers regarding whether a Supreme Court nomination has a hearing or a vote.

During his first term, Trump nominated three justices, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, thus helping to establish the Court's present 6-3 conservative majority.

Alito has been one of the most significant members of the Court. He authored the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that reversed Roe v. Wade and has on numerous occasions supported expanding presidential authority.

According to CBS, Alito is very good at putting together five-member majorities in cases that are closely divided. However, Alito showed no signs that succession planning was having an effect on him.

“We have tried to restore the original structure of the government as it was set out in the Constitution,” he told CBS. “But that’s an ongoing project.”

It is that unfinished project which could keep Alito on the court long enough to potentially upset Trump's plans.

President Donald Trump has previously fumed at the Supreme Court, which includes three judges he appointed, for differing from him on issues like his tariffs, his attempted suppression of mail-in ballots and his opposition to birthright citizenship. Now he has cited a right-wing commentator notorious for having been secretly funded by the Russian government to attack one of his own appointed justices, Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

“Amy Coney Barrett is clearly terrified of the left,” Tim Pool posted in a comment that Trump shared. In 2024 Pool was discovered by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department to have accepted money from two RT employees, Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, as part of their nearly $10 million plan to fund an unnamed Tennessee-based company that would influence American politics through pro-Trump commentators.

“Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims,” Pool wrote at the time. “I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed.”

In addition to Pool the scheme included Matt Christiansen, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern and Taylor Hansen.

Speaking with this author for Salon in 2018, a former US ambassador to Russia who Trump offered to hand over to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Michael McFaul, questioned whether Trump has been compromised.

“The generous interpretation,” McFaul said at the time, is that Trump “didn’t understand what he was talking about. But let’s be clear: What Trump was doing was assigning moral equivalency to a legitimate indictment with lots of evidence against several Russian military intelligence officers for violating American sovereignty in 2016 during the presidential elections, with a completely fabricated, cockamamie story invented by Putin. To even, for a moment, give any kind of dignity to what President Putin proposed was not in America’s national interest, from my point of view.”

President Donald Trump's misdeeds since returning to the White House have turned into a "long list," but as one former federal prosecutor argued for The Hill, "the worst thing" that he has done is clear.

James D. Zirin previously served as a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York and now regularly publishes legal analysis and op-eds for The Hill. In his latest piece from Tuesday, Zirin relayed the story of a "right-leaning" colleague asking him recently, "what is the worst thing Trump has done since he took office?" The "competition" for that ignoble honor, he explained, was fierce

"Is it the rampant corruption in Washington, using the criminal justice system for revenge on personal and political enemies?" he suggested. "Is it pressuring law firms, universities and media companies to achieve political ends? Barring press from the White House because he doesn’t like what they report? Weakening our alliances? Warring with science and the arts? The fiasco in Iran and the global exposure of our military’s weaknesses? Then there’s the self-valorizing East Wing ballroom or the Arc de Trump. Is it a pass to the dangers of AI, the outrageous lies or his repeated savaging of the three Supreme Court justices he appointed because he doesn’t like their decisions? Take your pick; it’s a long list."

Amid all of those choices, however, Zirin argued that, to him, "the coup de grâce" among Trump's worst, most corrupt second-term misdeeds was his "repeated undermining of judicial independence, trashing the three justices he himself appointed, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett," a stance he conceded was informed by his own background as an attorney and his reverence for the legal system.

"When Trump lost the tariff case in the Supreme Court, he called Justices Gorsuch and Barrett’s votes an 'embarrassment to their families,' labeled majority conservatives voting with the liberal minority 'disloyal, unpatriotic' and 'fools and lapdogs,' alleged without proof that the court was 'swayed by foreign interests,' and said he was 'ashamed' of the justices he appointed lacking the courage to do right," Zirin detailed to back up his argument. "His assault smacked of his mentor Roy Cohn’s playbook. In Cohn’s Bronx back room 'favor bank' ethos, if a politician was responsible for appointing a judge, that judge owed allegiance not to the law, but to the corrupt political system that gave him the gavel."

He added: "And when he lost the mail ballot case, Trump repeated his rubbishing of the justices: 'These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves,' he wrote in a social media post. Trump’s actions are those of a sore loser and a bully, and many Americans are prepared to live with that. Bullies thrive on weakness, and Alexander Hamilton thought the judiciary to be the weakest branch of government, having no sword and no purse."