Josh Hawley attacks Democrats for not providing security to Supreme Court justices at ethics row hearing

Republicans characterise criticism of Clarence Thomas accepting lavish gifts as partisan attacks at Senate hearing

Josh Hawley thundered at Democrats on Tuesday as he portrayed the recent revelations regarding expensive gifts that a sitting Supreme Court justice had accepted from a conservative donor as nothing but partisan hype.

And he argued instead that it was Democrats who were responsible for not protecting the integrity of the nation’s highest court by providing for adequate security for the Court’s justices — even though President Joe Biden had done just that when he signed a bill into law extending security to the family of justices last summer.

He would predict, in his remarks, that the president’s party would reject a funding request from the Court for new security measures which Senate Democrats say they support.

“So, in other words, the threat is, ‘We will deny you security unless you do what we want.’ Let me say that again. ‘We will deny you security unless you do what we want.’ We had an assassin come to the home of Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh and try to murder him, we have had credible threats on the lives of other justices, and now we have members of this body saying, ‘We will deny you security, for you, your families, your children, unless you do what we want.’ Extraordinary,” said the senator from Missouri.

The moment occurred during Tuesday’s hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which many critics of the Supreme Court had hoped at one point would be a reckoning for the Court’s justices, but instead was mostly a dry policy discussion thanks to the refusal of Chief Justice John Roberts to attend — and the inability of Democrats to issue a subpoena due to the absence of Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Mr Hawley’s remark about the attempted murder of Mr Kavanaugh refers to an incident that occurred last summer — a 26-year-old man with self-described mental health issues phoned authorities and explained that he was planning to kill a Supreme Court justice. He was later arrested with numerous weapons and other supplies near Mr Kavanaugh’s home in Maryland.

The security of Supreme Court justices has been an issue that Republicans have seized on in an attempt to portray Democrats as authoritarian and even supportive of the threats which some justices have faced. The issue reemerged this year after the Supreme Court submitted a budgetary request for millions in new security funding to counter a spike in threats to its members.

Democrats, meanwhile, remain fixed on the growing discontent that Americans have with the Supreme Court and the constant stream of news articles with revelations about justices that have drawn their ethical integrity into question. Many have centred around Clarence Thomas, a conservative member of the bench who is now known to have been the recipient of gifts in various forms from a right-leaning billionaire that all together are staggering in scope to many Americans.

While a handful of House Democrats did vote against legislation extending security to the families of Supreme Court justices last year, none actually expressed actual opposition to the idea that the families of justices should have additional protection. Some voted against the bill in protest, arguing that it should extend to lower-level federal judges as well, while progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fumed at what she saw as an inconsistency between Congress’s willingness to protect Supreme Court justices and the body’s refusal to address the epidemic of gun violence of which everyday Americans bear the brunt.