That’s the provocative title of my new essay in National Affairs, out this week. I’m mostly addressing conservatives who believe that judges ought to be “restrained,” as opposed the in contradistinction to the “liberal judicial activism” of the Supreme Court in the 1960s and ’70s. It’s puzzling that the attack would be that judges should have a bias towards inaction, towards sitting on their hands, when it’s precisely this deference to the political branches that allowed progressives to rewrite the Constitution during the New Deal. As I explain:
Read the rest of this post →Under the founders’ Constitution, under which the country lived for its first 150 years, the Supreme Court hardly ever had to strike down a law. The Congressional Record of the 18th and 19th centuries shows a Congress discussing whether legislation was constitutional much more than whether it was a good idea. Debates focused on whether something was genuinely for the general welfare or whether it served only a particular state or locality. “Do we have the power to do this?” was the central issue with any aspect of public policy.…