See Volokh Conspiracy: Roosevelt v. Garnett on 'Activism', and the link therein, to get a taste of the flavor of ABSTRACT and the resultant loss of sight of the reason for forming a more perfect union for the preservation of INDIVIDUAL liberty.

My comment:

Toss in the Gore case. The court preempted the traditional role of the House to resolve the Presidential selection process in the event of (perceived) problems in the electoral process in a given state. The House did not need the court to say anything at all to consider the Florida election as going for Bush (or Gore, or no one). And, had the court gone for Gore, the House could have simply ignored the US Supreme Court. A lazy House is hardly a reason to ignore the extraordinary power that was assumed by the court. I just don't know whether to call it judicial activism or political in-activism on the part of the House so as to let them escape the brunt of the political heat that would accompany a truly "political question" if ever there was one.

The court is just another hoop through which the weight of government comes down on people -- real people not artificial people. The system needs a court to act, and act properly, as a limiting-filter for the assertion of the power by others . . . just as surely as a computer operating system needs a printer driver to operate in conjunction with a printer. Without a driver the whole thing crashes or fails to function, regardless of whether one views the people as the controller or as the controlled. A self-neutered judiciary (rendering themselves harmless to limit government action) is little more than tossing out the entire scheme of having three co-equal branches, as a means of protecting individual liberty. Orwell once had something to say about when the advocates of one thing mean exactly the opposite.

Shall we limit the judiciary to limit the government so as to maximize our individual liberty. This does not need a whole book to be presented as an internally incoherent argument and thus absurd from the outset. Unless protecting liberty is not the reason for having our government. In which case the whole thing has been consumed by the accumulated weight of multiple exceptions that have simultaneously swallowed the whole. All I see are a number of big fish competing, at the scent of blood like sharks, to consume liberty. It would be equally illogical to expect two sharks to agree to let the prey escape (from a simple calculation of maximizing their aggregate benefit as predators).

For fun read:
Galbraith's piece on Predator State.

Hypocrites abound, either that or most folks get lost in the complexity of trying to cull through piles of minutia (or is that manure).