About two decades ago, Justice Antonin Scalia went on a duck hunting trip with then-Vice President Dick Cheney. This trip became an issue because the Supreme Court was considering a case challenging some of Cheney’s official actions within the Bush administration, and a party to that case asked Scalia to recuse because of his personal relationship with the vice president.

In his opinion denying this request, Scalia argued that requiring justices to “remove themselves from cases in which the official actions of friends were at issue would be utterly disabling.” Many of the justices, Scalia explained, “reached this Court precisely because they were friends of the incumbent President or other senior officials,” and his opinion described several past examples of close relationships between ju

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