But while the Kavanaugh situation may have cast a spotlight on the politicization of the Supreme Court — and arguably exacerbated it — the institution is hardly a politically pristine one. While Supreme Court justices generally stay out of the politics of the day, we occasionally get a glimpse behind the bench and find that politics permeates all.

When Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) appeared on “Fox and Friends” on Thursday morning, the hosts thought they had a gotcha moment. Given Democrats' complaints about Kavanaugh’s partisan rhetoric last week, they asked, why hadn’t Coons also expressed concern when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg attacked Donald Trump in 2016. “I was unaware of that particular comment,” Coons said, before quickly saying, “That was also inappropriate.”

As I wrote when she made it, Ginsburg’s comment — like Kavanaugh’s testimony — seemed to break new political ground for the court, with a sitting justice weighing in publicly against a major-party presidential nominee even as voters were contemplating their decisions. “I can’t imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president,” said Ginsburg, who has become a liberal icon in recent years. She even joked about her late husband talking about moving to New Zealand if Trump won.

A key difference between Ginsburg and Kavanaugh, though? Ginsburg later said she regretted her remarks.

Sixteen years prior, another justice’s feelings about a presidential election caused concern about politics infecting the court. “This is terrible,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said when Al Gore was (prematurely) declared the winner in Florida during the 2000 election, according to Newsweek. The Wall Street Journal reported that O’Connor’s husband “mentioned to others [her] desire to step down” and that Gore’s election would make that more difficult. Jeffrey Toobin’s 2001 book quoted O’Connor spreading a right-wing conspiracy theory about the Gore campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort, just a day after the Supreme Court issued a key decision in Bush v. Gore.

The lack of a 2016 hearing for Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, also laid bare political divisions. Ginsburg at the time argued that the GOP-controlled Senate was doing the wrong thing by saying the next justice should wait for voters to pick a new president. “The president is elected for four years, not three years, so the power he has in year three continues into year four,” she said, adding: “Maybe members of the Senate will wake up and appreciate that that’s how it should be.” Her comments came even after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) cautioned the justices against opining on the political matter.

On a smaller scale, there are the almost unavoidable political ties of many of these nominees. Whether it’s the conservative activism of Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, or Elena Kagan declining to recuse herself from Obamacare cases despite serving as solicitor general in the Obama administration, justices rarely come from completely apolitical backgrounds. Indeed, the path to becoming a justice often requires this delicate dance, as then-Justice Antonin Scalia once recalled (via The Washington Post’s Robert Barnes):

When a law student several years ago asked Justice Antonin Scalia about the path that would someday lead to a federal judgeship or perhaps even the Supreme Court, the answer sounded surprising. Get involved in politics, he said.

Barnes continued:

The thing that separates all the smart lawyers who would like to become federal judges from the ones who actually become judges is most often political connections. Involvement in ideological causes, political campaigns and conservative or liberal organizations acts as a sieve. It separates out those who are chosen by the political elite for lifetime appointments. And then Senate confirmation is supposed to instantly transform the recipient into a nonpartisan and objective trier of facts and interpreter of laws.

And that’s the key. There is no such thing as an apolitical justice. It’s no coincidence that a large number of decisions divide the court into roughly the same, opposing camps. Some of that boils down to judicial philosophy — “originalists,” “textualists” and “strict constructionists” roughly equating to conservatives, and “pragmatists” and “moralists” (among other terms of choice) roughly equating to liberals — but some of it is because people are drawn to those philosophies for the same reasons they are drawn to political ideologies and parties. Those philosophies, in some ways, betray the justices' preexisting politics.

The question from there is where you draw the line between a philosophical or even ideological approach and a partisan one. Weighing in on presidential elections suggests you’re allied with one team or another, rather than simply happening to often agree with one team or another. The former is where Ginsburg and (reportedly) O’Connor erred.

Kavanaugh then took things a step further by not just weighing in on presidential elections but also speaking explicitly about how one political party was bad and had wronged him. You could rather easily infer from Ginsburg’s and O’Connor’s comments that they weren’t particularly nonpartisan; with Kavanaugh, the concern is that he will carry a political vendetta against a particular party into his job and be more tempted to judge accordingly. (Even Thomas, in declaring a “high-tech lynching” in his response to Anita Hill’s allegations, didn’t explicitly blame Democrats as a party for it.)

We may have wound up in this position eventually. That’s especially given the trajectory of our polarizing politics and the increasingly vicious partisan fights over judicial nominations, which in the past five years have come to require no minority votes to succeed. Ginsburg’s public commentary, in particular, greased the skids.