TPM does the day in 100 seconds

Add comment May 27th, 2009

Exploding the myth of conservative disdain for judicial activism

9 comments May 27th, 2009

 One of the great political falsehoods of our time is that conservatives are opposed to what they call “judicial activism” while liberals are all for it.

 We’re hearing a lot of this nonsense in the current debate over President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.  “Stop her!” shout the right-wingers. “She’s an activist judge.”

 But what is judicial activism?

My favorite definition of the term is something I saw the other day among comments on another blog. Judicial activism, said the writer, is “anything any court prescribes or proscribes that pisses me off.”

 While there’s no official definition of judicial activism, the typical conservative take on the matter, as I understand it, is that activist judges are inclined to substitute their opinions for those of the elected representatives of the people. The activists, in effect, make laws from the bench by striking down (or recklessly expanding) laws enacted by elected legislators at the federal, state or local level. That’s what happened when the Supreme Court voided state laws against abortion.

 The opposite of judicial activism, according to the right-wingers, is judicial restraint.  The theory here is that judges should interpret the law — that is, rule on its applicability in certain circumstances — rather than override the stated will of the people’s elected representatives by throwing out the whole statute.

 John McCain put it this way last year:

The moral authority of our judiciary depends on judicial self-restraint, but this authority quickly vanishes when a court presumes to make law instead of apply it…

In the shorthand of constitutional discourse, these abuses by the courts fall under the heading of “judicial activism.” But real activism in our country is democratic. Real activists seek to make their case democratically — to win hearts, minds, and majorities to their cause. Such people throughout our history have often shown great idealism and done great good. By contrast, activist lawyers and activist judges follow a different method. They want to be spared the inconvenience of campaigns, elections, legislative votes, and all of that. They don’t seek to win debates on the merits of their argument; they seek to shut down debates by order of the court. And even in courtrooms, they apply a double standard.

Some federal judges operate by fiat, shrugging off generations of legal wisdom and precedent while expecting their own opinions to go unquestioned. Only their favorite precedents are to be considered “settled law,” and everything else is fair game.

 But in reality, right-wingers are at least as much in favor of judicial activism as liberals are; they’re just loath to admit it. How many conservatives were disappointed when the Supreme Court overturned a local ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., last year? None that I know of.

 Here was an ordinance that had been adopted by the duly elected representatives of the people of Washington, just as similar ordinances in other locales had been adopted by elected officials.

 The high court had no precedent on which to rely in making its decision.  Never before in the more than 200 years since the Bill of Rights was adopted had the Supreme Court said that the rights afforded by the Second Amendment apply to individuals.

 Never before had any of the tens of thousands of gun-control laws in this country been overturned by the Supreme Court on Second Amendment grounds.

 The folks who wanted to overturn the Washington ordinance and others like it didn’t pursue the matter in the way that McCain prescribes.  They didn’t persuade the people’s elected representatives to repeal the handgun ban. No, they did what McCain said is wrong to do: They got a court to act in their favor.

 Mind you, I actually agreed with the court’s ruling in the D.C. handgun case, but I also recognized the delight among right-wingers as hypocritical, given their vaunted hatred of judicial activism.

 In a sense, many, if not most, cases decided by the Supreme Court involve judicial activism. When five or more justices deem a law or ordinance — or even the outcome of a referendum — to be violative of the Constitution, they are engaging in judicial activism. They are making law from the bench. Actually, they are undoing law from the bench. They are saying that laws banning handguns or banning abortions or banning flag-burning or barring black folks from public transportation are null and void. It happens all the time.

 A great irony in all of this is that there are two studies showing that judicial activism, as it’s popularly defined, has been more common in recent years among conservative justices on the Supreme Court than among liberals.

The numbers are HERE.

If you’re from Spain or Portugal, are you Hispanic?

4 comments May 27th, 2009

 The nearly universal claim that Sonia Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic justice on the U.S. Supreme Court is not valid, according to some folks.

 Their argument is that Benjamin Cardozo (above), who served on the high court for six years in the 1930s, was of Portuguese descent and therefore was the first Hispanic justice.

 The truth of the matter is somewhat elusive, as we see HERE.

Former U.S. military interrogator says torture has cost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives

1 comment May 27th, 2009

Former Bush adviser says it’s suicidal for GOP to attack Powell and Sotomayor

1 comment May 27th, 2009

 Mark McKinnon, a former media adviser to George W. Bush, has issued a WARNING to his fellow Republicans:

  “Blasting targets like Sonia Sotomayor and Colin Powell is a surefire strategy to guarantee our extinction.”

 But, of course, McKinnon’s advice will be ignored by the hard-core rightists who comprise the GOP’s dwindling base.

 UPDATE: Greg Sargent CHIMES IN on this matter.

Have you heard the conservative theory that Sonia Sotomayor isn’t very intelligent?

4 comments May 27th, 2009