Eight days after a heavily armed man called police and declared that he was going to give meaning to his life by murdering Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Congress appropriately passed a law extending all of the justices’ security coverage to their families.

The suspect, 26-year-old Nicholas Roske of Simi Valley, California, earlier had traveled to Kavanaugh’s home.

Every such threat has to be taken seriously. The government must do everything possible to protect justices and their families.

The vote was unanimous in the Senate. In the House, 27 Democrats voted against the bill, but only because they wanted to extend protections to Supreme Court law clerks and staff.

The threat against Kavanaugh came as the House special committee investigating one of the most grotesque acts of political violence in U.S. history — the Jan. 6, 2021insurrection at the Capitol aimed at reversing the results of the 2020 presidential election to favor Donald Trump — conducted hearings.

Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, both testified at one of the sessions. They were election workers in Fulton County, Georgia, during the 2020 election. In a frantic effort to prevent Georgia from certifying its election result in favor of Joe Biden, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani concocted the lie that Moss had passed a thumb drive containing election data to her mother as the vote count progressed, and likened it to passing “vials of heroin or cocaine.”

The federal government can’t protect every election worker in every precinct. But Congress should pass a law making it a high-level federal felony to threaten any election worker in any election.

— The Citizens’ Voice, Wilkes-Barre via TNS