Judicial Activism

There's been a lot of complaining lately in some Republican quarters about what they have dubbed activist judges. To hear Tom DeLay tell it, activist judges are those judges who circumvent the law by making decisions that reflect their own liberal convictions. Activist judges are prone to do things like rule in favor of gay marriages or in favor of a husband who probably knows his wife's deathbed wishes better than her parents do (whether or not the man in question is an asshole is really a seperate issue). Of course, this sort of thing is only a problem when Republicans don't share the convictions. It would be quite acceptable, for instance, for judges to rule in favor of displaying the decalogue in courthouses, or in favor of overturning Roe v Wade. That wouldn't be activism. It would naturally be a correct reading of the law. Nor was it activism for Florida courts to ignore the law in 2000 when it decided democracy is best served by not counting all the votes in a presidential election. Or that same year, when the Supreme Court mysteriously voted along party lines to elect the President of the United States. That, too, was a correct reading of the law. Democrats, apparently, just needed a little extra tutoring in law school.