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He already explicitly said months ago that he would not ask Kagan to recuse.

I don't believe that the Chief Justice has the ability to deny any SC justice the ability to hear and rule on a case for any reason. Such power would effectively give the Chief Justice the ability to select which justices would get to decide every case.

I don't believe that the Chief Justice has the ability to deny any SC justice the ability to hear and rule on a case for any reason. Such power would effectively give the Chief Justice the ability to select which justices would get to decide every case.

That is true, but the Court has no authority to compel any other court or administrative body to apply its rulings to anything other than the parties involved with the case at hand. Its rulings are given wider respect than that because they are generally assumed to have a legitimate Constitutional basis, and because few people want to act in a way which, were it brought before the Supreme Court, would be ruled illegitimate.

In a 5-4 decision where the minority were to call out the majority decision as being illegitimate, not least of all because one of the justices rendering was doing so in clearly-illegal fashion, and where the minority's opinion had a sound rational base behind it and the majority opinion did not, I suspect a lot of people would recognize that the legitimate decision was the "minority" one. Many sports' rules have language explicitly stating that certain officials' judgments have absolute authority: if the ball rolls across the plate in front of a motionless batter but the Home Plate Umpire calls strike, it's a strike. No such language exists in the Constitution. The Supreme Court has no authority to issue rulings contrary to the Constitution, and any such rulings it may issue have no legitimacy.