Of all the candidates and potential candidates in the ever-widening Democratic field for 2020, one of the more under-the-radar aspirants so far has been Michael Bennet, the two-term Colorado senator whose presidential ambitions were revealed late last year. Bennet got a recognition boost on January 24, when his Senate-floor speech lambasting the “crocodile tears” of Ted Cruz went viral. Earlier this month, Joe Scarborough showered him with some prime national-media praise in a February 11 Washington Post column. And this week, Bennet is in the news for a swing through Iowa on Thursday and Friday, to meet with voters, which will presumably help solidify his 2020 decision. But overall, Bennet is still largely an unknown quantity as far as the wider American electorate is concerned, especially compared to fast-rising Democratic stars like Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar.

In fact, in certain quarters of New York City, his younger brother is considerably more famous than he is: James Bennet, the editorial-page editor of The New York Times, and one of several likely successors to Times executive editor Dean Baquet, in another couple of years.

As the person who oversees all of the Times’s opinion coverage, James Bennet has one of the most influential jobs in American journalism—and also one of the most fraught. Being in charge of editorials and op-eds for the Times essentially makes you a lightning rod, and James’s tenure, which began in 2016, has seen plenty of sparks, from reader outrage over writer selections like Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss, to a messy editorial-board appointment, to a jaw-dropping op-ed from an anonymous senior Trump-administration official.

Things had been quiet recently—but that was before Michael began testing the waters. I asked James this week how he intended to handle the potential conflicts of interest if his brother decided to join the already crowded Democratic field, and he deferred to Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy. She told me: “In the event that Senator Michael Bennet announces an exploratory committee or a potential run for president, his brother, editorial-page editor James Bennet, will recuse himself from any work generated by the opinion desk related to the 2020 presidential election. He will not discuss, assign, or edit any editorials, op-eds, columns, or other opinion pieces that are substantially related to candidates or major issues in the campaign. These responsibilities will be handled by the deputy editorial-page editors, Kathleen Kingsbury and James Dao, for as long as Michael Bennet is seeking higher office. Even now, James is not involved in any editorial decisions related to the senator.” (The opinion department is entirely separate from the newsroom, so James already wouldn’t have any influence over news coverage of his brother.)

One can’t conjure a precedent in which the editor or editorial-page editor of a major American newspaper had a sibling who was either running or possibly running for president, which makes James’s situation particularly unusual—and a little cruel, too. Because it would also be highly unusual for the editorial-page editor of a major American newspaper to have no involvement in any election-related coverage during an election season, especially one that is primed to be as combative and historic as the 2020 sweepstakes. Covering the election is a huge part of the job, and there are any number of gray areas regarding big topics that could easily be election-adjacent. For example, would an opinion series on, say, climate change have enough 2020 relevance that James would have to watch from the sidelines? Certain instances will have to be judged on a case-by-case basis, according to Murphy. All that said, even if Michael Bennet did jump into the fray, he could theoretically be knocked out of the running as early as the start of the primaries in February of 2020, in which case James Bennet could get back to work on the biggest story of the year.

As for his own future career ambitions, when I asked James last year about the Times executive-editor horserace, he demurred: “I know you’re not gonna believe this, but I just don’t live my life that way. That’s not how I think. . . . I came back here to do this job. I guess we’re gonna see how that plays out.”