Scalia’s hunting trip with Cheney was unseemly. Forgetting the particular issue of whether Scalia should recuse himself from the pending case involing Cheney, Supreme Court Justices should make it a rule not to become the friends and cronies of high-level executive branch officials. One of FDR’s great sins was to appoint cronies to the Supreme Court, then lobby them in phone and in person on pending cases involving the executive branch. In turn, they should have (but as far as I know, didn’t) told him to f*** off. Frankfurter, in particular, never broke his political ties with Roosevelt. The Supreme Court has aggregated a lot of power to itself, including the power to determine disputed elections; the public tolerates this because the Court is supposed to be independent and at least much less political than the other branches. The least the Justices could do is maintain a personal distance from executive branch officials to avoid the appearance (and temptation) of cronyism, given how many pieces of legislation dear to the heart of any particular administration they are likely to rule upon. There are thousands of people in DC for Scalia to make friends with. The Vice-President doesn’t have to be one of them.
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