Scalia's ducking of recusal injures court

From the Houston Chronicle's political columnist Cragg Hines:

In January, Scalia went duck hunting in Louisiana with Vice President Dick Cheney at the camp of an oil-service executive. Now, Scalia has formally refused, after a litigant's challenge, to recuse himself in a civil case stemming from Cheney's leadership of a task force to formulate the Bush administration's energy policy.

Scalia's decision runs counter to both the judicial code (especially the canon that calls for judges to regulate out-of-court activities "to minimize the risk of conflict with judicial duties") and federal law (a judge "shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned").

Scalia was stung enough by the controversy that followed his and Cheney's bayou merriment that he issued a 21-page memorandum Thursday denying the Sierra Club's petition asking that he not participate in the case.

In effect, Scalia says that, yes, he'd like to do right, but, no, that would be too easy and wrong -- not to mention wholly unnecessary.

The civil case in question, of course, is the environmentalist Sierra Club's attempt to get Cheney to reveal the participants of the task force that met early in the Bush administration in order to formulate US energy policy--this policy eventually turned out to be a virtual wish list in tax breaks and deregulation for the energy industry: the Sierra Club assumes, and they're probably right, that these mysterious participants were simply representatives from oil and electricity companies. There's a lot on the line in this case. It seems that Scalia, widely known as the Supreme Court's most conservative Justice, is bound and determined to see that the White House gets the ruling it wants.

Truly, Scalia's antics reveal the Republicans in power as, in the words of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, "the most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen."

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