Supreme Court asks Congress for $19M to bolster security as 'serious threats' to justices' lives have DOUBLED since Roe v Wade was overturned and amid controversial Trump-related decisions

The Supreme Court is asking Congress for another $19 million for security just as it issued a decision that will keep Donald Trump on the primary ballot in all states. 

The money would be used to assign justices personal security due to 'evolving' threats. 

The money is part of a $9.4 billion budget request sent out last week for the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary in the fiscal year 2025 appropriations, which are supposed to be passed by October 1. 

Included in the $19 million request is $13.6 million to expand the Supreme Court Police, its in-house force, and $5.8 million to allow that force to take over the task of protecting justices at their homes, which is currently done by the US Marshalls Service. 

Eric Lamar, right, of Washington, DC, stands in protest outside Supreme Court Monday

The security-related measures are part of a request for a 21 percent increase in funding to $146.3 million in fiscal year 2025, at a time when conservatives are demanding the federal budget is cut. 

The US Marshals Service reports that serious threats to the high court doubled between 2021 and 2023, going from 224 to 457. 

The rest of the federal judiciary is seeking $805.9 million for court security, citing 'significant increase in threats against federal judges.' 

Last week lawmakers passed a fourth stopgap funding bill to work out a spending plan for the fiscal year that began in October. This week lawmakers will work to pass funding for six agencies of government before March 8 and the other six including the judiciary before March 22. 

Following the leak of the Roe v. Wade decision in 2022, Congress approved legislation to expand police protection for the families of the justices and senior officers of the high court. 

Anti-Trump demonstrators protest outside the US Supreme Court as the court considers whether former US President Donald Trump is eligible to run for president 

The high court on Monday ruled 9-0 that only Congress, not Colorado, can ban Trump from the ballot and the former president must be reinstated on the Centennial State's primary ballots. 

The ruling brings to an end efforts in Colorado, Maine and Illinois to exclude the former president from ballots using a mechanism that disqualifies 'candidates engaged in insurrection' from taking office again.

Colorado's Supreme Court last year ruled that Section 3 did apply to Trump, the first time a court had applied the mechanism to a presidential candidate.  

But in their 20-page ruling, the justices said only Congress could determine who was allowed to run. 

'States may not unilaterally disqualify Donald Trump from the ballot', they said in an unsigned opinion. 'The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court is reversed.'

The case is the court's most direct intervention in a presidential election since Bush v Gore, when it effectively handed the deadlocked 2000 result to Republican candidate George W. Bush.

But Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with three liberal justices in a concurring opinion that said the ruling should be more narrow in scope. 

She joined in the overall decision, but warned against 'stridency' in divisions on the court – during an election season where the high court is making weighty decisions on presidential immunity while lower courts make scheduling decisions that will determine whether Trump faces jury verdicts before the November elections.

'The majority’s choice of a different path leaves the remaining Justices with a choice of how to respond. In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,' Barrett wrote in her one-page opinion.