Clarence Thomas’s wife called for the 2020 election to be overturned. Samuel Alito had rightwing flags flying at two of his properties. Yet both conservative justices are set to rule on Donald Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution for his election meddling, despite calls from Democrats that they step back from that and other cases because they are conflicted.

In an opinion essay published in the New York Times, Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, a prominent Trump antagonist in the House of Representatives, proposed a novel way to force the two justices off the case:

The US Department of Justice – including the US attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed US special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims – can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.

The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 USC Section 455. The Constitution has come into play in several recent Supreme Court decisions striking down rulings by stubborn judges in lower courts whose political impartiality has been reasonably questioned but who threw caution to the wind to hear a case anyway. This statute requires potentially biased judges throughout the federal system to recuse themselves at the start of the process to avoid judicial unfairness and embarrassing controversies and reversals.

We’ll have to see if the justice department takes him up on this strategy. Meanwhile, the Trump immunity case could be among those released at 10am ET, when the supreme court issues decisions.

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Right off the bat this morning, at 10am ET, the supreme court will issue opinions, potentially on some of the closely watched cases the justices have yet to rule on. Among these is Donald Trump’s petition for immunity from the federal charges brought against him for trying to overturn the 2020 election, as well as a pair of cases dealing with abortion access. One concerns whether the Biden administration can require hospitals in states with strict bans on the procedure to perform the procedure in emergencies, and the other deals with a conservative effort to roll back the availability of abortion pill mifepristone. With six conservative justices and three liberal justices, the court has a pronounced rightwing tilt, but plenty of uncertainty remains, and, as alway, we do not know in advance which cases they will rule on, or how many opinions they will issue.

A ruling in the Trump case would present an interesting split-screen with the scene in New York, where jurors are beginning their second day of deliberations in his business fraud trial. There’s no telling when they will reach a verdict, but however they find the former president will undoubtedly send shockwaves through the 2024 election campaign.

Here’s what else is happening today:

• A group of Senate Democrats are demanding the justice department investigate oil companies and executives after the Federal Trade Commission accused a former petroleum executive of colluding to raise gas prices.

• Joe Biden is spending the day in his home state of Delaware, after yesterday making a push to rally Black voters by holding a rare joint rally with Kamala Harris in Philadelphia.

• Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman, argued in the New York Times that there is a way to force conservative supreme court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to recuse themselves from cases dealing with the 2020 election, amid reports of their connections to rightwing causes.