Thank you for the reference. It is as you say.
I wonder, was there any call for Rehnquist to recuse himself, at the time?
Are the Justices exempt from having to recuse themselves?
Thank you for the reference. It is as you say.
I wonder, was there any call for Rehnquist to recuse himself, at the time?
Are the Justices exempt from having to recuse themselves?
I'm no expert on the subject (for lack of time and resources, I'm mainly using the Wiki articles here) although I do have some exposure to it; from what I understand, there was a lot of criticism of Rehnquist and his refusal to recuse himself; the
wiki article on Laird v. Tatum discusses that subject very briefly.
The Supreme Court justices are not exempt from having to recuse themselves and have done so on any number of occasions. Again, the wiki article on
recusal contains a decent discussion of when a Supreme Court justice will recuse him/her self along with a number of different instances in which particular justices have recused themselves. Frequently, they will recuse themselves when they have a financial interest that might be implicated in a decision, or when they are related to a party or an attorney in a case.
Whether a Supreme Court justice can be forced to recuse him/her self, or be punished for failing to recuse him/her self, I do not know; however, I would hazard a guess that in a sufficiently egregious case, the Chief Justice, or the most senior Associate Justice, might refer the matter to the Congress with the suggestion that the matter was a proper subject for impeachment hearings. But that's just my own wild speculation.