Time to really expose the activist judges

[Igel]

17. Until recently (D) and (R) used 'activist' in different senses.

(R) tended to mean judges that found rights that required the government to do something or which allowed judges to do things the government wanted. This didn't just allow increased government authority, it required that the government expand authority to implement the court's order.

A standard example from the '70s was, I think, Poughkeepsie NY (IIRC) where a judge found that the city was unconstitutionally underfunding the school system and said, basically, "Raise taxes."

(D) have tended to mean judges that struck down laws. Revisionist history has Roosevelt fighting "activist" judges that unvalidated laws and didn't find ways to allow for him to have more authority.

I have to say "tended" because there's no such thing as "Democratic" or "Republican" opinion: There are platforms that vary by election and candidate, there are pundits and there are politicians, but getting either group to have a single opinion on almost anything is well night impossible. (Unless we allow that single opinion to define the group boundaries: So yesterday I read a post that tried to say if somebody said X they couldn't be a Democrat, because all Democrats would reject X. That's less a True Scotsman fallacy and more of a definition.)


In the last 10 years or so the tendencies have gotten a bit smeared as more (D) are conservative, in that they want to preserve the status quo against changes, and more (R) are liberal in the sense that they want to revamp things. (Even these are tendencies and not absolute traits: Conservatives have always seen things they wanted to radically change, and liberals have always found thingst hey wanted to retain or revert to.)