He hasn’t given it yet, no one knows what subject he’ll tackle, and he probably doesn’t even have a final draft written. Yet a range of critics on the left have already panned a high-profile speech Justice Neil Gorsuch is scheduled to deliver in Washington, D.C., in September.

The issue, however, isn’t what the Supreme Court’s newest justice might say, or even the influential conservative organization he’s addressing. The rub is the venue: President Donald Trump’s five-star, $200 million luxury hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.

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Deborah Rhode, director of Stanford University’s Center on the Legal Profession, concurs.

“In my view [the controversy] is 100 percent about the hotel,” she says. “I have no objection about him speaking before a conservative group. This is about lending [Supreme Court] legitimacy” to Trump’s decision to keep the hotel while in office, “a practice nearly every ethics professor has found deeply troubling.”

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While it may seems like a tempest in a teapot, Rhode of Stanford University says the debate over Gorsuch’s appearance has consequences beyond political gossip or liberals’ lingering anger at Republicans’ Supreme Court hardball. “It matters because the legitimacy of the Supreme Court is absolutely critical in a democratic society,” she says.

“I think since the matter has been called to [Gorsuch’s] attention in the most public possible way, we have to believe that he’s choosing to send the message that he is” by keeping the invitation, she says. “Clearly being so ethically tone-deaf is illuminating about his character.”

Still, “I think so many actions by this president have pushed us into a new era of just unprecedented indifference to ethical violations,” Rhode says. “This is just one of many.”

Her concern, Rhode says, “is the public is pretty inured to this — of all the things Trump has done wrong, is [ownership of the Trump International Hotel] one that leaps out at you? And that’s where the real risk comes — it’s ethics fatigue.”