You've heard "activist judges" so many times - from the president, from Congress, from the angry guys on the radio - that you can define it right along with me. Together then: Liberal activist judges make law, as opposed to interpreting it. They ignore the plain meaning of texts to invent new rights. Superimposing their moral views onto their legal reasoning, they brazenly advance the cause of the fringe liberal elites in the culture wars.
This canard really doesn't get debunked much in the media as much as it should.
The "conservative" "strict contstructionist" "position" on the consitution is founded on falsity and hypocrisy, and although Lithwick is going in the right direction here, she dones't go far enough at all.
To "believe" in the "conservative position," you have to assume that:
*there exists a single unique interpretation that the "founders" had,
*this position can be known by reading the entrails of source documents,
*this position should be applied today, despite the fact that the constitution embodied a host of contradictions that were previously resolved (e.g., slavery, women's rights, and so forth).
In the end, the "conservative" position is fundamentally nihilistic: it makes claims that are founded on nothing.
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