An American judge now worships behind hired guards.
A lawyer friend told me about him. He is prominent, he is handling a case you would recognize, and the church near his home had to bring in private security to protect him and the congregation around him. The hatred aimed at him from the left had grown that ugly. His name and his church do not belong in print, because naming either could put more people in danger. That a judge has to be hidden to stay safe is the condition the judiciary now works under, and it did not get there by accident.
Last Wednesday night, someone called police and reported gunshots at the Virginia home of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The caller claimed to be a neighbor. Officers moved toward the house, and Barrett’s security detail confirmed within minutes that the report was false. No one was hurt. That does not make it harmless.
A prank is the wrong word
Swatting works by lying to armed men. You tell a police dispatcher that a shooting is underway at an address, and officers arrive expecting to meet a gunman. The caller is not playing a joke; he is trying to manufacture a violent encounter and let the police carry it out.
You do not send armed officers to a justice’s door at night on a false report of gunfire unless you are hoping the door opens wrong. Swatting a justice is an attempt at an assassination that someone else pulls the trigger on. Some coverage filed the Barrett incident under hoaxes and pranks. PJ Media named the move for what it is. The minimizers are wrong, and the record on the courts proves it.
The Court has lived this before
This did not come out of nowhere. After a draft of the Dobbs opinion overturning Roe v. Wade leaked in 2022, activists bused crowds to the justices’ private homes, including Barrett’s. Then it stopped being protest. A man flew across the country with a gun and a knife to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his Maryland home. He told police he was set off by the leaked draft and the gun ruling he expected next. A federal judge sentenced him to roughly eight years, a term the Justice Department is appealing as too light.
Then came the church. Last October, police arrested Louis Geri outside the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, hours before the justices were due to attend the annual Red Mass. He had more than 200 homemade explosives in a tent on the cathedral steps and carried a manifesto against the Catholic Church, Jews, and the Supreme Court. The justices stayed away. The man who flew to kill Kavanaugh, and the man with the bombs at the church, are the public version of my friend’s story.
Chief Justice John Roberts reports that threats against federal judges have more than tripled over the last decade. Two men tried to kill Donald Trump in 2024 out of the same fevered climate. This column is about the judges, and the judges have been living under it for years.
Where the permission comes from
Any ruling the left loses gets recast as proof that the Court itself is illegitimate.
Virginia showed the reflex in real time. The state’s supreme court struck down a Democratic congressional map because the legislature broke the state constitution’s amendment process to put it on the ballot. The court enforced the constitution. Virginia’s Democratic leaders ran to the U.S. Supreme Court and argued the state court had overstepped its authority and nullified the votes of millions of Virginians. A court followed the law, and the officials who lost called it a theft from the people.
The reform argument does not survive a look. Term limits get sold as a way to make the Court accountable. They do the opposite. Elections and confirmations are the accountability. A justice who will never again face a vote or a Senate is less answerable, not more. We already know what removing the next election does to a politician, because we watch it every time a president governs his second term with nothing left to lose.
Court expansion is the same play with the mask off. Representative Ro Khanna has a bill to impose 18-year terms. Senate and House Democrats have a bill to add four seats and turn nine justices into thirteen. Its sponsors pitched their own bill as a way to restore the Court’s legitimacy. They named the project out loud.
But the size of the Court is set by Congress, not the president. Republicans hold Congress and the White House right now. If the Court genuinely needed more justices to do its work, the GOP could add them today and fill every seat. Democrats would call that an illegitimate power grab before the ink dried, and they would be the same people demanding expansion the moment it runs the other way. Expansion is legitimate to them only when it adds their justices. The whole project is about power, not the size of the Court’s docket, and it treats any outcome short of total control as illegitimate.
Chuck Schumer stood on the Supreme Court steps in 2020 and told two justices by name, “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.” Roberts rebuked him. He walked it back the next day. The line never went away.
None of this means a senator or a bill author wants a justice shot. It means that when you spend years teaching the country that the Court is not a legitimate institution but a stolen one, you lower the cost of attacking it. And the men who actually attacked it told us why. One named the rulings that enraged him. The other carried a manifesto against the Court to a church.
The laws are already on the books
Two sets of tools sit unused. Federal law already makes it a crime to picket a judge’s home to influence a ruling. It went essentially unenforced when the crowds showed up at the justices’ houses in 2022. Separate laws cover the false reports behind swatting. An institution that will not enforce the laws protecting its own judges teaches everyone that the judges are fair game.
Not just the Supreme Court
Some on the left have answered the Barrett swatting by asking whether anyone cares about threats to judges who are not on the Supreme Court. The answer is yes. And the people running the delegitimization campaign are the ones who built the danger for all of them. My friend’s judge does not sit on the Supreme Court. The hatred found him anyway.
The branch the Founders left unarmed
The Founders made the judiciary the weakest branch on purpose, and Alexander Hamilton said why in Federalist 78. The president holds the sword. Congress holds the purse. The courts hold neither. They have, in Hamilton’s words, “neither force nor will, but merely judgment.” A court cannot field an army to make anyone obey it. It depends on the rest of the country agreeing that its rulings are binding.
That dependence is the whole design, and it is the target. A branch that runs on nothing but its own legitimacy collapses the moment that legitimacy is gone. Term limits sold as accountability, court expansion sold as balance, elected officials telling the Supreme Court that a state court stole an election: every one of them pulls at the single support the weakest branch has.
A judge worshipping behind hired guards is what this looks like on his street. The bills and the slogans are what it looks like in Washington. They are the same project, aimed at the same place. Keep telling the country the courts are illegitimate, and you take the one thing the Founders gave the weakest branch to stand on.
