The political party of a judge isn’t supposed to matter. Frank Johnson seems like he was a decent person, but these things aren’t all supposed values of the Republican Party:

His decisions on voting rights, equal opportunity employment, affirmative action, humane conditions for prison inmates, and the rights of mental patients to adequate care affected the nation and the world.”

Voting rights are an issue of political philosophy, so I’ll leave that aside. Equal opportunity employment is fine if it’s totally voluntary on the part of the employer, however, if the government forces the employer’s hand, then it is coercion, immoral, and big-government anti-Republicanism. Affirmative Action enforced by the government is ridiculously immoral and it’s impractical because it replaces merit with tokenism. Humane conditions for prisoners are fine. There is no such thing as a right to other people’s care. If it’s not voluntary, it’s enslavement of either the carer, or more likely of the people forced to pay for the care. If mental patients are unable or unwilling to trade for their own care, and other people don’t want to volunteer to pay, then stealing from the sane to subsidize the insane is not a winning formula.

It may feel good to pander to the subjectivity of some black voters, but Johnson’s decisions listed here have had a negative effect on the nation and the world, which is easy to see sixty years later down the road to serfdom.