What is a judicial activist?
The left has co-opted another term, “judicial activist.” What do we mean? What do they mean? A judicial activist is a judge who acts as if the Constitution says, “We the Judges of the United States do hereby ordain and establish this living Constitution for the United States of America, which means whatever we judges decide it means.” The late Sen. Sam Ervin (D-North Carolina), agreed: “A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he instead of the Founding Fathers had written it.”1 In Judge Robert H. Bork’s words: [A]n activist is a person who reaches results that have no plausible relationship to the Constitution. You may be overturning a lot of statutes or very few. But the question is have you made an argument that shows that what you are doing comes out of the Constitution. If you don’t make that argument, if you don’t make that showing, you are an activist.2 When the left uses the term, they’re referring to a judge who they thi
