A few days before Christmas I nearly swallowed my tongue when I read the following complaint brought by the Democrat Party's newspaper of record, The New York Times:
The Supreme Court's rightward shift is only part of the story, legal scholars say. The court has also been accumulating vast power, insisting that it should have the last word – at the expense of every other part of the government.
Yes, you're reading that correctly: the perilously, hilariously left-wing New York Times arguing for judicial moderation and restraint. If you're curious why that is so astounding, consider that had it not been for the very act of oligarchic overreach by the federal courts, the near totality of progressive, left-wing policy over the course of the last half century would have never been implemented.
"The court… accumulating vast power" is precisely the purpose of the infamous, "living, breathing" Constitution approach of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and company. And now The New York Times wants to blast it?
Moreover, consider that what the modern court is doing – what has the Times' worked into such a lather – isn't judicial activism or power consolidation anyway. In fact, the current Supreme Court era can best be seen as a moderate effort to repeal the activist rulings of the past in order to restrict its own power.
The controversial Dobbs case serves as a prime example. In their ruling, the court didn't make abortion illegal, it actually declared that the court shouldn't be involved at all. Abortion law is policy, they concluded, and they aren't a policymaking branch. Far from "insisting that they should have the last word," as the Times fretted, the court explicitly gave the last word to the people and their representatives.
Further, it's interesting that around the same time the Times was performing their bizarre judicial activism 180, a Supreme Court decision was handed down relative to the Trump-era immigration policy known as Title 42.
Notice what Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of those despicable Trump-appointed conservative justices, explained in his dissent:
…courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort.
Leave the issue aside and merely observe the judicial philosophy in that statement. This has been the conservative approach to jurisprudence since at least the era of Ronald Reagan, who has to be rolling over in his grave at the sight of The New York Times now echoing his famous sentiments:
The role assigned to judges in our system was to interpret the Constitution and lesser laws, not to make them. It was to protect the integrity of the Constitution, not to add to it or subtract from it — certainly not to rewrite it.
Reagan's fear of a "small elite" ruling by fiat over the people is what animates the current conservative justices of the Supreme Court to push back against judicial consolidation of power.
Simply put, since the era of Earl Warren, judicial activism has been the unconstitutional shortcut utilized repeatedly by the Left to accomplish what they could not accomplish through lawmaking branches. If the Times is now opposed to it, more power to them.
