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The Situation Room

Supreme Court Justices Testify on Capitol Hill. Aired 10:30a- 11a ET

Aired July 14, 2026 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:31:46]

PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: All right, in a rare appearance on Capitol Hill, Supreme Court justices are testifying on the need for more security. Let's listen in to Justice Kagan.

ELENA KAGAN, U.S. SUPREME COURT ASSOCIATE JUSTICE: As events at the Capitol and other federal courthouses revealed our building's vulnerabilities, we also added new physical security systems.

When personal threats increased following the Dobbs leak, we expanded our residential security and threat assessment activities. Similarly, as online attacks grew in number and sophistication, we requested additional cybersecurity resources.

Our strategy has been consistent across security functions, expand incrementally, but effectively to meet evolving security challenges. We are not alone in this. Although orders of magnitude smaller, the Supreme Court's police department is modeled after your own Capitol Police Department.

The two departments have matching pay tables and similar organizational charts. They work closely together on threats pertaining to the Capitol campus and beyond. They also face many of the same challenges, including officer recruitment and retention. and they have implemented many of the same solutions to address those challenges.

Over the last five years, the Capitol Police Department's annual operating needs have increased 70 percent, a figure similar to the courts. For fiscal year 2027, Capitol Police requested a 16 percent increase. As neighbors, our two police departments will continue, I'm very sure, to work cooperatively together.

Our respective departments' growing needs are obvious, given current conditions. The Capitol Police Chief recently testified that threats against Congress are up 50 percent this year. The Supreme Court police expect a smaller, but still very substantial 38 percent annual increase in threats this year, which follows a 25 percent increase last year.

For some of us, those threats have come very close, and all of us live with the knowledge that they may again materialize. But, as the chief justice has said, all members of the court continue to do their jobs as they believe legally right, adjudicating cases without fear or favor.

We are grateful to the Supreme Court police for all they do to support our ability to do so. Again, we thank you for your invitation to come here. While we cannot comment on decisions or pending cases, Justice Barrett and I are happy to answer any budget-related questions you may have.

REP. DAVID JOYCE (R-OH): Thank you, Justice Kagan. I now recognize myself for questions.

Chief Justice Roberts himself referenced a rise in threats in the judicial branch in his 2024 year-end report. He specifically cited more than 1,000 threats investigated against federal judges in just the preceding five years.

Would you talk about how the volume and nature of threats against the court has changed over the past several years, particularly following the Dobbs decision and the 2022 incident at Justin Kavanaugh's home? Has the threat level changed in 2026? And what do you believe is driving that trend?

[10:35:03]

AMY CONEY BARRETT, U.S. SUPREME COURT ASSOCIATE JUSTICE: The numbers as you've mentioned, it was up 25 percent last year, on track for 38 percent this year.

And those...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Microphone, please.

BARRETT: Good?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

BARRETT: And those statistics sound abstract, but being on the receiving end of them is not. So I thought I would just share a little bit about how the threats have affected me and my family personally.

They have required me to -- or my children to think about and see things that children should not have to see or think about. One example is, when threats to my life were particularly intense a few years ago, around the time of the Dobbs leak, my security details sent me home with a bulletproof vest.

And I carried it into my house, put it into my bedroom, dropped it down on a table, turned around, and my 12-year-old son was standing in the doorway of my bedroom, and he wanted to know what it was and why I had it.

And I didn't know how to respond, because maybe I lack imagination, but I didn't expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one.

It's also been reported in the news that roughly six weeks ago I was the victim of a swatting incident. At that point, my teenage son, one of my teenage sons, opened the door to go out with friends and saw in our street it was full of police cars who had responded to a false report of gunshots and raised voices in my home.

I was very, very grateful that I had Supreme Court police outside my home because they were able to stop and meet with and explain to the county police that it had been a false alarm, and so the police did not actually attempt to enter our home.

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' son, who I think, as you mentioned in the beginning, Mr. Chairman, was deceased -- is deceased because he was killed by a disgruntled lawyer who showed up at Judge Salas' home, intending to kill her, but her son, 20 years old at the time, opened the door and took the bullet instead.

Her husband standing behind was seriously injured. So I think the message on these deliveries being sent in his name is clear. As Justice Kagan said, federal judges across the country, throughout the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, continue to do their jobs without fear or favor, but the threat level is really high.

JOYCE: Over the last few years, we've seen an increase in First Amendment-related activity around D.C., including the Supreme Court campus. The Supreme Court building itself has had perimeter fencing up at various points in recent years.

What is the current state of permanent physical security upgrades to the building? And how much of this budget request is dedicated to Capitol improvements versus ongoing personnel costs?

BARRETT: I think...

KAGAN: Oh, go ahead. No, go ahead.

BARRETT: No, feel free.

(LAUGHTER)

KAGAN: Most of the money for this increase is personnel and not building arrangements.

We have occasionally put up perimeter offenses. We don't like that. We want to express a commitment to be open and transparent to the public, as I know other governmental institutions do as well. Occasionally, we have found it necessary, given the threat level, to put up some barriers, but they come down as quickly as we can take them down.

So, some small part of the funding request is for building improvements, but, mostly, it's for security personnel.

JOYCE: Protecting the court and justices involves coordination between the Supreme Court Police, obviously, the U.S. Marshals Service, Secret Service, Capitol Police, and local law enforcement, depending on your location. Would you walk us through how those responsibilities are divided and

whether any gaps or redundancies in the structure that we should be aware of?

BARRETT: We are primarily taken care of by the Supreme Court police. When we needed additional residential security, and the Supreme Court police was unable to staff that, the Marshals Service did help us, and so our homes were protected by the Marshals Service -- I might be wrong about this -- two years or so.

The Marshals Service was not able to sustain that level of support, and so they asked the Supreme Court police to take that over, and the Supreme Court police is now doing that with the help of contractors.

We coordinate with Marshal Service sometimes in travel, but really the Supreme Court police does the bulk of it, and I think for physical safety, there's coordination with the Capitol Police, given that our grounds are so close.

KAGAN: And I should say we like it that way, to have our own police force rather than to be reliant on the Marshals Service, which is within the Department of Justice. This way, we just get more control over our own security arrangements.

Some of you may recall last year we asked for a supplemental request, and that was to deal with the problem that we had thought that we had a longer stretch of time to make the transition between the Marshals Service and the Supreme Court police. In the end, we had to make it more quickly than we thought we would.

[10:40:17]

And we're very grateful to the various committees in both the House and Senate for making sure that we had the supplemental monies that were -- that enabled us to make that transition more quickly than we had thought was necessary.

JOYCE: Thank you.

I now recognize Ranking Member Hoyer for any questions he may have.

REP. STENY HOYER (D-MD): Thank you very much.

We are all very concerned about the security and the safety of our judiciary, not only because of you individually, but because the impact it would have on our system and the disincentive for people to serve in the roles that are so critically important to our society.

Let me go to the staffing. You said similar -- the pay levels are similar to the Capitol Police, and that they obviously work together and interface together. Is your budget now sufficient so that you will not have contract employees, outside contractors protecting your homes?

BARRETT: Not at this point. The goal is to be able to staff so that we can entirely absorb residential security within our office, and I am sure our staff can provide more details about the timeline for that, but, at this time, it is not.

HOYER: Will the budget that is projected for fiscal year '27 allow you to do that? Do you know?

KAGAN: I think still not, but we will be getting closer.

And, certainly, our goal -- and we want IT to be as a short-term goal as we possibly can -- is to get to the point where we are not reliant on any outside contractors.

HOYER: I think it is critically important to have people who really know you, your habits, your to and fro-interesting. As someone who...

KAGAN: You are speaking to the choir there.

(LAUGHTER)

HOYER: Well, as someone who had a security detail for 20 years in my previous positions, I found it critically important that they got to know me and my habits and the habits of my family and made them much more proficient in protecting me.

So we want to make sure that that's the case. Let me go to -- and I'm not asking you about the substance of decisions, but I am asking you. There has been a substantial increase in what I guess we call shadow decisions.

Is that a budget-related or policy-related phenomenon?

BARRETT: Well, let's see. I think that litigants have long had the ability to seek interim relief from the court, but I think you are certainly right, Ranking Member Hoyer, that we have seen a big change in the volume and the nature of such requests.

The court is doing its best to adapt and respond. I think it is a policy question, not so much a budget one.

I don't know if you have additional thoughts.

KAGAN: I am sure there will be additional questions.

(LAUGHTER)

HOYER: Does that impact on the transparency, which you referred to not putting up fences so that people had access?

There are concerns, obviously, that these shadow dispositions impact adversely on the knowledge the public has about how the court makes its decisions and who is making what decisions. Do you want to comment on that?

KAGAN: Ranking Member Hoyer, there are definitely issues with respect to the emergency -- we call it the emergency docket. Some of us call it the interim docket. I -- it's a terminology nightmare. I call it the emergency docket. And there are definitely questions about how it is appropriate to use

that docket, when it's appropriate to use that docket, the standards to be applied, the way those standards actually work out in individual cases.

And you see that in some of our decisions, because we are, in many, if not most of these cases, not unanimous. There will be a majority and a dissent. The reason I think it is probably not appropriate, at least not now, to call it the shadow docket, is because we have done, I think, a better job in the recent past of, where appropriate, and it's not always appropriate, but where appropriate, explaining ourselves, at least to a moderate degree.

I think if you had asked me this question a year ago, I might have said that there would be -- there were some cases, and, in fact I did say, I had said in some public events that there were some cases where we did so little explanation of what lay behind our order that lower courts had a great deal of difficulty trying to figure out what that order was.

[10:45:18]

Were we saying something about the merits of the case? Were we saying about -- something about who had standing to contest the merits? Were we saying something about appropriate remedies? Nobody knew.

I don't think that that's so much a problem anymore. I think that, as we have gotten more experienced in these constant requests that are coming to us about requests for emergency relief, that we better recognize that at least sometimes there is a need for additional information.

And we have issued opinions, and sometimes majority and dissenting opinions accordingly.

HOYER: Thank you very much.

JOYCE: Thank you.

The chair now recognizes Mr. Amodei for any questions he may have.

REP. MARK AMODEI (R-NV): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

To provide some context, obviously, security is probably rightfully so at the top of the pyramid, as we discuss the court and its budget. How's business?

(LAUGHTER)

AMODEI: I mean, anybody know where you are? Anybody filing this side? And you have kind of touched on a little bit in response to Mr. Hoyer's questions, but to have an idea of how things are running in the machine of, well, we got nine justices, and here's who comes to us, and here's what we're doing, here's what we're turning down, here's what we're accepting, just to have kind of a background context to this discussion about security. So, however you want to address that.

BARRETT: Sure.

AMODEI: How's business going?

BARRETT: Yes, well, business is business as usual, or maybe not as usual.

So we do everything we can to be transparent and to welcome the public into the court. We have really taken strides in adapting our Web site to make it more user-friendly. So people can come to our Web site, they can easily access all the briefs, all the opinions. The Web site also has information about who the nine justices are, the history of the building, that sort of thing.

Our courtroom is open to the public. We routinely have public courtroom lectures to groups that are coming in. I believe all of my colleagues -- I know I do -- speak to groups and school groups that come through to educate them about the court.

Our curator has exhibits throughout the first floor of the court to educate people about the court, including a wonderful exhibit that's up about Cooper v. Aaron. We have the Cooper Bench from the famous case that's out in the court right now, complete with a video explanation of it in which all nine of us participated.

So I do see a need for educating the public about what it is the court is doing. And so the court I think has done its best to try to make that accessible to the public.

AMODEI: Great. Thank you.

How about caseload? What's the case -- I know threats are way up. How's caseload?

KAGAN: Well, we have -- as Ranking Member Hoyer suggested, we have a more than ordinary emergency caseload. I would say we have about an ordinary, regular docket. If you look back really a number of decades, our docket has gone down.

When I clerked at the court, so that was -- I'm afraid to say how long ago, but in the late 1980s, the court handled about 140 cases a year. The court now handles, in terms of regular argued cases, maybe 70 cases a year, so a significant decrease.

There's a cottage industry and explanations for why that decrease took place over time. But for all the time that I have been on the court, we have been relatively stable, so the last 15 years or so. We're doing about maybe one year at 75, one year at 60, but something on that order. So we continue to hear cases every month and to always decide, always issue all our opinions before July 4 every year.

AMODEI: Thank you. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.

JOYCE: Thank you, Mr. Amodei. The chair will now recognize the lovely lady from Connecticut, Ms.

DeLauro, for any questions you may have.

REP. ROSA DELAURO (D-CT): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

And just a point before I get to my questions with regard to the exchange with Justice Kagan and Congressman Amodei. It would appear that -- these are the court statistics. In 2006, there were 10,256 total cases, in term 2024, 4,500, almost 4600 cases.

So it is about a 55 percent decline. I have to imagine and then analyzing that...

[10:50:02]

KAGAN: This is in petitions, are we talking about?

DELAURO: Yes, so that it may be that what happens there is the interim, shadow, whatever docket we're talking about here, that may come -- may be a part of that, so that there has been fewer cases than you pointed out that have happened in prior decades.

And then the issue of staffing is -- how commensurate is then the staffing to what the case is? But let me just -- and I won't get into this, but in terms of there's always the view out there of, what about cameras in the court? We have them everywhere here. But as members of Congress...

KAGAN: Is it good or bad?

(LAUGHTER)

DELAURO: Ah, OK. I will take a breath on that. No, it's...

KAGAN: I'm sorry. I didn't mean to turn it around and...

DELAURO: No, no, you were very good. It's very good. It's called transparency.

Anyway, my questions. As members of Congress, we follow very strict gift and ethics rules. We are not allowed to accept any gift if it's over $50 at one time. And there's a total value is more than $100 in the calendar year from any individual. There are exceptions. And an entire committee, we have an Ethics Committee that decides whether a trip or a gift is allowed.

But as justices of the Supreme Court, you can and do accept these gifts without any committee or without hesitation, or maybe there's hesitation, but in any case, you can accept these gifts.

The Supreme Court does not have a gift ban or a binding code of ethics. I know, in 2023, a voluntary code of ethics was adopted, but it is entirely self-policing without any mechanism for enforcement. It is more permissive than the code that applies to all other federal judges. And just in full transparency, I strongly support Ranking Member

Raskin's High Court gift ban, which would bring the Supreme Court justices' rules in line with the rest of the federal government. Based on the financial disclosures available for the justices, tickets and trips have exceeded this threshold of the -- which is in the voluntary code this last year.

So, a couple of questions from this. Is this a time to make this a requirement, instead of a suggestion? That's my first question.

BARRETT: You want me to do gifts? I -- Ranking Member DeLauro, I would be happy to address the question about gifts.

The court follows the restrictions of the Judicial Conference of the United States applicable to all judges with respect to gifts, and we are not -- there are restrictions on our ability to accept gifts. We are not permitted to accept gifts, with some nuances and some exceptions, from litigants before the court.

And any gifts that we do expect -- accept, this is by statute, there's a statutory limit on any on reporting, that requires reporting of any gift. I think that the limit is about $500 right now. You would know. They would be on our financial disclosures because we have to disclose that.

So, with respect to gifts, we do have constraints, and we do have our in-house counsel. I mean, any time I have any question about how the code applies to a particular circumstance, I always call him.

Did you want to address enforceability?

KAGAN: On the code of conduct, as you noted, we -- the nine justices all agreed to a code of conduct. It's specifically geared towards the Supreme Court.

As you also noted, there is a question about enforceability. And right now, the mechanism has no enforceability system. And this is something on which various people have spoken in the past, and I have made my views known in the past, which is that I think we should work hard to try to figure out some enforcement system.

I will say that that's an extremely difficult question, for a pretty obvious reason, I think, which is that I don't think that you would want an enforcement system that was controlled by the executive branch or...

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: We're going to continue to monitor this important hearing upon Capitol Hill, two U.S. Supreme Court justices, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, have been testifying about the increased security problems facing the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices.

And, at one point, Pamela, we heard Amy Coney Barrett talk about this the police giving her a bulletproof vest to take home and potentially wear, given the threats that have been unfolding against these justices. [10:55:00]

BROWN: Yes, she was really personal in her accounting of the threats she has faced and how it's impacted her and her family.

And she talked about receiving that bulletproof vest after the Dobbs case leaked, and she took it home and said her 12-year-old son asked her what that was, and she was sort of caught off guard and didn't know how to explain that to him, and that it was a really tough situation to be put in, but that this is the reality these justices are facing.

And she also talked about the threatening mail that they have received as well. And so it is very rare that justices go to the -- Capitol Hill like this and testify. The last time was in 2019. But, in this case, they are doing this to make this appeal to lawmakers in this budget hearing to give them tens of millions of dollars in personnel security.

Mainly, we heard that from Justice Kagan that that's the big request here, is more personal security.

BLITZER: There's clearly a lot of concern right now, and they want the Supreme Court police to have more funds to better protect the justices and to better protect the Supreme Court and the people who work there as well, given the threats that have been unfolding.

It's pretty sad in our country that we even have to have an issue like this, but that's going on right now.

BROWN: That's just the reality they face.

And, also, we're expecting to hear more from lawmakers just about this last term. It was a very divisive term, as you know, Wolf. And we're told by sources that we expect this to go beyond just budget matters.

So we're going to continue to monitor this. And we're going to take a quick break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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