Two Supreme Court justices will sit before a House Appropriations subcommittee on July 14 to answer questions about the court's budget — the first time in seven years the people's branch has hauled the unelected branch in for public accountability.
This is a structural rarity the Founders would have appreciated. The judiciary, insulated by lifetime appointments and immune to voters, almost never faces direct questioning from the elected representatives who control its purse strings. That it's happening now — after a term that saw the court reshape executive power and after years of congressional passivity — signals at least a flicker of the legislative branch remembering its constitutional role.
Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett will testify before the House Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee about the court's fiscal 2027 budget request, according to the committee agenda released Tuesday. The Daily Caller reported the FY2027 funding bill would provide $207 million for the Supreme Court — nearly $44 million more than the current fiscal year, including an additional $14.6 million for security.
The court wants more money. Congress, for once, wants answers about where it goes.
House Appropriations Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro pressed for the justices to testify about the funding, according to Punchbowl News. Subcommittee Chair Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said members should stick to the budget and avoid turning the hearing into "some sort of circus."
That warning is telling. The last time justices testified was 2019, when Kagan and Samuel Alito appeared before the same panel. Alito used his opening statement to thank Congress for security funding after threats against justices escalated — including the 2022 assassination attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh by an armed man arrested outside his Maryland home, and protests at the private residences of six conservative justices following the Dobbs leak. The would-be assassin, Nicholas Roske, was sentenced to roughly eight years in prison in October 2025, CNBC reported.
The security concerns are real. The question is whether Congress will use this rare moment to press broader accountability questions, or let two justices deliver a budget pitch and walk.
CNBC framed the hearing as a routine fiscal matter, burying the structural significance beneath a recitation of recent rulings and partisan appointments. The Boulder Daily Camera, in an editorial published the same day, didn't cover the hearing at all — but argued that Congress has "repeatedly failed to assert itself, seemingly content to see its authority diminished" against a court that has "advanced the supremacy of the executive branch at the expense of the legislature."
That editorial was right about one thing: the Founders feared exactly this dynamic. They designed three co-equal branches with the power of the purse sitting squarely in the House. A budget hearing may seem procedural, but it is one of the few constitutional levers the legislature has over a judiciary that answers to no voter.
This term alone, the court upheld birthright citizenship by a razor-thin margin, shielded Federal Reserve governors from presidential removal while simultaneously granting presidents sweeping power to fire heads of other independent agencies — contradictory rulings issued the same day by the same chief justice. Whether any of that comes up on July 14 is the open question.
Cole wants a polite budget discussion. DeLauro wants specifics. The American people, who fund the entire operation, should want to know whether their representatives will finally use this rare constitutional lever — or waste it.
