All that said, should Thomas recuse just to stay far away from straying over any line?

Antonin Scalia took up this question when he was pressured to recuse himself in a 2004 case involving Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force after being part of a duck hunting trip with Cheney.

Scalia argued, persuasively, that the standard shouldn’t to be to resolve any possible doubt in favor of recusal, because the Supreme Court isn’t a court of appeals, where a recusing judge is simply replaced by another judge. When a Supreme Court justice recuses, he or she is off the playing field and an eight-justice court decides the case, perhaps changing the outcome. This is why the justices said in their Statement of Recusal Policy issued in 1993 that they “do not think it would serve the public interest to go beyond the requirements of the statue, and to recuse ourselves, out of an excess of caution.”

Scalia points out that there is no precedent for justices recusing themselves in cases involving friends who are government officials. Indeed, justices have been friends with high-level government officials throughout the history of the court — that’s often how they got on the court in the first place. Much of the Supreme Court that decided the famous Youngstown case involving Harry Truman’s seizure of the steel mills, Scalia notes, were friends of President Truman, with four having been appointed by him.