From the July 1, 1992 article by Neil A. Lewis titled “The 1992 Campaign; Selection of Conservative Judges Insures a President’s Legacy”:

If President Bush fails to win re-election this November, his successor will no doubt move swiftly to undo many of his policies. But one aspect of Mr. Bush’s legacy will not yield to quick change, and that is the sharply conservative makeup of the nation’s Federal courts.

Building on the record of Ronald Reagan before him, Mr. Bush has put into place a Federal judiciary with its own distinct conservative philosophy that could dominate the courts for decades.

During his Presidency, Mr. Reagan appointed about 325 lawyers to the Supreme Court, the appellate courts and the district courts. So far, Mr. Bush has appointed 150 more, so that now 60 percent of the nation’s sitting Federal judges were selected by these two men. And Mr. Bush is expected to fill 30 more slots before Election Day.

In picking judges, the President has been faithful to Mr. Reagan’s approach of selecting conservatives. Mr. Bush’s choices are generally white, wealthy, male and perhaps most striking of all, relatively young. Since they are appointed for life, some of these judges could sit on the bench through 10 or more Presidential terms.

True to Their Tenets

Their impact is already unmistakable, a strong rebuke to anyone who still believes that judges are simply neutral umpires in some grand legal game.

True to the key tenets of the conservative judicial agenda, these judges tend to construe laws as narrowly as possible and usually favor law enforcement officials over criminal defendants. They also typically defer to Congress in deciding close constitutional issues….

But even with that, the tendency of Reagan-Bush appointees to vote in certain definite patterns throughout the court system has proved to be reliable. Indeed, several political scientists are now able to produce computerized studies demonstrating the differences between the rulings of these appointees and those of judges appointed in earlier years — especially the 187 judges named by President Jimmy Carter.

Simply plug in the decisions, these studies say, and Reagan-Bush judges are shown to be markedly different even from those who were put on the bench by Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, both also Republicans….

Such results are the endgame of a remarkable effort by Mr. Reagan, and now Mr. Bush, to remake the nation’s courts — a crusade driven by many conservative lawyers and officials who have worked to take advantage of Republican control of the White House.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Delaware Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, complained that conservatives were trying to achieve policy changes through the judicial process that they could not achieve through the political process.

Under the Constitution, the Senate shares responsibility with the White House for putting judges on the bench. But Mr. Biden’s committee and the Democratic-controlled Senate have largely acquiesced in the Reagan-Bush effort by confirming most of their nominees. Several Democrats have explained that they are reluctant to oppose candidates solely on ideological grounds.

But Mr. Biden served notice in a recent speech that he would try to change that attitude and said he would reject any nominee whose philosophy does not represent a balance between a conservative Administration and a more moderate Senate...

While much of the public’s focus has been on the Supreme Court, Republican judge-pickers have paid special attention to the nation’s 13 Federal circuit courts of appeals, the level just below.

The district courts generally conduct trials, and those judges are most closely bound by precedent. Moreover, Senators from the same party as the White House are traditionally given a great say in who is named to these courts, reducing the influence of the White House in the selections.

But appellate judges, while theoretically also bound by precedent, have more freedom to innovate and stretch the boundaries of the law. And since the current Supreme Court has decided to review ever fewer cases each year, the circuit courts’ opinions often become the law of the land.

The judge-pickers in both the Reagan and Bush Administrations have paid particular attention to the ideologies of the lawyers they selected for the circuit courts. Reagan-Bush nominees now make up the majority on 10 of the 13 appeals courts; the two Presidents have appointed about 70 percent of the nation’s appellate judges.

The selectors may not enforce any litmus test on a given issue, as Administration officials say. But that turns out to be almost beside the point, since there are other ways to determine someone’s philosophy.

“It’s very hard to get named to an appellate court post by this Administration unless you pass the political smell test,” said one former Administration official. “It’s not even very subtle.”

Basically: The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. This made me think of a quote by Tim Wise in Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat From Racial Equity: 

So if a black person of some notoriety agrees with a racist assumption made regularly by white people, those white people can no longer be thought of as engaging in racism. Which means by definition, that if even one prominent black person could be found who would defend segregation or enslavement — and of course, such persons existed — neither of those amounted to racism either: a position so intellectually putrid as to merit no further comment.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/01/us/the-1992-campaign-selection-of-conservative-judges-insures-a-president-s-legacy.html.; Wise, pg. 97.