Under this standard, a Justice should recuse if he has some financial or significant personal interest in one of the parties to a case. Or if the Justice, a spouse or family member is a party to the litigation. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson recently said she would recuse from the case challenging Harvard’s admissions standards because she is a member of Harvard’s board of overseers. This is an appropriate reason for recusal.

But Ginni Thomas’s personal views on the election do not make her a party to any case likely to come before the Court. In her text messages in 2020 and 2021 to then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, she was expressing her personal political views that the 2020 election had been stolen.

Very few cases that come before the Court aren’t political in some sense. If a spouse’s political views are grounds for recusal—say, on abortion—the Court might never have a full complement of nine. That result may be precisely the result that Democratic and media critics of Ginni and Justice Thomas want to achieve with their recusal demands.