There is a certain irony in that being strongly ideological is sort of by definition a bad thing in a judge if you subscribe to a classical view of conservatism. Anyone who comes to a court with a particular legal ideology to push violates the very first principle of anything you can honesty call conservative jurisprudence. These people (Bork, Scalia, Thomas, Alito to highlight a few) haven't been 'conservative'; they are all ideo-warriors, and since Goldwater have mostly really just been right wingers, not conservatives. American right wingers cloak themselves in the historical patina of a classic intellectual movement with a certain level of virtue that is actually at this point completely absent from their movement, which is now more about protection of privilege and entrenched economic interests and the use of white nationalism and culture war agitprop to co-opt enough lower socio-economic class members at the ballot box to maintain their power to maintain those protections in a nominally democratic system. The newest twist being that faced with incipient failure of that enterprise, they are now ready to simply jettison the remaining trappings of democracy as well.