There is no hole in Raskin’s legal reasoning, as he presented it in today’s New York Times. The law is very clear, whatever a whining Alito might have to say about his wife’s indomitable flag flying habits and his own complete and obvious objectivity. We can only hope the remainder of the MAGA caucus on our highest court heed binding federal law, the Constitution, and their own precedent and force their two openly pro-insurrection colleagues to obey the law and take themselves off of pending cases that will decide the fate of insurrectionists, and quite possibly our Republic.

The only weakness in Raskin’s impeccable, beautifully written argument is that the action irrefutably required by the Constitution, explicit federal statute and Supreme Court precedent, depends on the transactional ethics of “justices” from an extremist judicial fraternity actually following the law to enforce required ethics. Several of them (Kavanaugh, Roberts — rewarded by Dubya Bush for his excellent work on the case that made him president — and Coney Barrett) were partisan actors, sent to Florida in the days leading up to Bush v. Gore, a highly dubious legal ruling decided by at least two judges (The Black Klansman being one of them) who had an ethical obligation to recuse themselves from that nakedly partisan case. The Federalist Six are lifetime political appointees who have many times over revealed their lack of integrity and their fraternity’s united contempt for precedent, norms and the rule of law.

Here’s a taste of Jamie Raskin’s op ed in today’s NY Times:

In one key 5-to-3 Supreme Court case from 2016, Williams v. Pennsylvania, Justice Anthony Kennedy explained why judicial bias is a defect of constitutional magnitude and offered specific objective standards for identifying it. Significantly, Justices Alito and Thomas dissented from the majority’s ruling.

The case concerned the bias of the chief justice of Pennsylvania, who had been involved as a prosecutor on the state’s side in an appellate death penalty case that was before him. Justice Kennedy found that the judge’s refusal to recuse himself when asked to do so violated due process. Justice Kennedy’s authoritative opinion on recusal illuminates three critical aspects of the current controversy.

First, Justice Kennedy found that the standard for recusal must be objective because it is impossible to rely on the affected judge’s introspection and subjective interpretations. The court’s objective standard requires recusal when the likelihood of bias on the part of the judge “is too high to be constitutionally tolerable,” citing an earlier case. “This objective risk of bias,” according to Justice Kennedy, “is reflected in the due process maxim that ‘no man can be a judge in his own case.’” A judge or justice can be convinced of his or her own impartiality but also completely missing what other people are seeing.

Second, the Williams majority endorsed the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct as an appropriate articulation of the Madisonian standard that “no man can be a judge in his own cause.” Model Code Rule 2.11 on judicial disqualification says that a judge “shall disqualify himself or herself in any proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” This includes, illustratively, cases in which the judge “has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party,” a married judge knows that “the judge’s spouse” is “a person who has more than a de minimis interest that could be substantially affected by the proceeding” or the judge “has made a public statement, other than in a court proceeding, judicial decision or opinion, that commits or appears to commit the judge to reach a particular result.” These model code illustrations ring a lot of bells at this moment.

Third and most important, Justice Kennedy found for the court that the failure of an objectively biased judge to recuse him- or herself is not “harmless error” just because the biased judge’s vote is not apparently determinative in the vote of a panel of judges. A biased judge contaminates the proceeding not just by the casting and tabulation of his or her own vote but by participating in the body’s collective deliberations and affecting, even subtly, other judges’ perceptions of the case.