Brett Kavanaugh is now Justice Kavanaugh. He has been nominated, confirmed and — in a private ceremony on Saturday conducted by Chief Justice John Roberts and the retired Justice Anthony Kennedy — sworn in. There is nothing left to do. So why is he scheduled to be at the White House on Monday evening for a public ceremony, one that President Trump has inaccurately called a “swearing-in ceremony”?

Like all new justices, Justice Kavanaugh took a judicial oath in which he swore to “faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me.” But in the wake of his highly politicized remarks at his confirmation hearings, a large portion of the country has doubts that he will live up to that noble aspiration. He needs to demonstrate the independence and neutrality that he himself has stressed is essential to the work of the Supreme Court. A first step would be to politely decline to go to the White House for the ceremony.

In recent decades, there has often been a White House ceremony for a new appointee to the Supreme Court. Usually, as with Justice Neil Gorsuch, it is the occasion for the administration of one of the oaths new justices take. But that swearing-in is also a pretext for what has become a highly politicized victory lap for the president. Since Justice Kavanaugh has already been sworn in, this time even the pretext would be absent.

Like so much else that is unseemly in American politics, the White House swearing-in ceremony is not limited to one president or one party. The practice seems to have begun with Ronald Reagan, but Bill Clinton kept it up. Each of the current justices except Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor had a White House ceremony. In each instance, a beaming president (or, in Stephen Breyer’s case, the vice president) expressed approval, pride and the expectation that the new justice would do the right thing — often with not very subtle indications of what the right thing would be.