“Judicial Activism” and The Left’s Newspeak

Conservatives have spoken of the Constitution existing in exile for many years. The tide of judges seeing the law as their personal seer stone from which they may divine the fundamental truth about how each situation should be handled has only increased in recent decades

 To call out this blatant abuse of power, conservatives coined the term “Judicial Activism” to highlight cases in which judges gave us their best impression of an elected legislator so they could rewrite laws to suit their own predilections.

Yet, even this term is an excessively polite way to characterize the creation of petty fiefdoms of the law where the majority judges rule their serfs by legal fiat.

 In the 1980s and 90s the term became a negative label which the left attempted to distance themselves from. They failed in this strategy, so they resorted to their perennial trump card: redefinition. The left has taken the terms “progressive”, “liberal”, and now “judicial activist” and appropriated them for their own ends.

Whenever any liberal political commentator uses this term, it is in a sense gutted of its original meaning. After this gutting, they shoved in the guts of a new nomenclature.

This slain and reanimated Frankenstein of a word now references the tendency of a judge to strike a law that is passed by a legislator (i.e. virtually any law).

There is no more meaningless redefinition which could have been adopted to confuse the debate. Who in their right mind defends the view that a judge should either always strike down or always uphold any challenged statute?

The tendency of a judge to do either of these options tells you zero about their judicial philosophy. It may tell you of their desire to avoid controversy or to embrace it, but a law challenged today and one challenged tomorrow have no necessary similarly except the fact that someone challenged it. Its constitutionality is an entirely separate question.

This term was redefined so liberals could escape the charge of being activists who legislate from the bench. They now wield this term to charge conservative judges with hypocrisy whenever they overturn a law. “See!” they say, “conservatives are activists too because they struck down a law!”

The left’s inanity has no bounds, but their matchless talent for pernicious verbal virtuosity is one of the most frequent venues for its display.