Instead of just announcing his refusal to recuse himself from the Sierra Club's case against Dick Cheney, Antonin Scalia has released a 21-page letter (PDF) which reminds me of nothing so much as the 18-page letter Ken Starr sent to Brill's Content after that magazine's premiere issue took his office's illegal leaks to task.

At one point, Scalia states, "If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court justice can be bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined." It's clear that Scalia is ignoring the actual issue at hand, probably willfully. No one is concerned that Scalia was "bought" with a duck-hunting trip. The concern is that Scalia and the plaintiff are personal friends. I was called for jury duty last fall, and they were striking jurors simply for knowing defendents. Scalia and Cheney, ideology aside and politics aside, are friends. Scalia's argument that Cheney doesn't stand to suffer personal harm if ruled against is laughable -- if the Court rules against Cheney, it will be tacit confirmation of many things the population has believed about Cheney since he resurfaced in 2000. And the argument that Scalia, despite his arch-conservatism, is a man of principle and not a dangerous partisan -- an argument severely damaged by Bush v. Gore -- is no longer something I'm willing to abide.