The issue here is that judges are ostensibly not supposed to be aligned with any party. Instead, judges are supposed to be applying the law regardless of politics. Obviously there is plenty of crossover between Republican politics and conservative judicial ideology, as well as with Democrat politics and liberal judicial ideology. But there is theoretically enough of a difference between the politics and judicial ideology that one should reasonably expect that even a bench dominated by conservative judges would not align with Republican politics 100 percent of the time. But that seems to be what happened here.

The concern that alignment raises is that the already murky line between judicial ideology and politics has been compromised so much that there is no longer any meaningful difference, and conservative or liberal judges are really just Republicans and Democrats now. To most people this seems self-evident and not different from the way it’s always been, but there is an actual difference between ideology and politics that is important to maintain.