AS THE partisan infighting over increasingly powerful federal judicial appointments reaches a fever pitch, the Supreme Court in the past few months has taken a welcome respite from its recent history of enlarging its own power to veto the decisions of popularly elected officials, Gonzalez v. Raich and Kelo v. New Haven, the Court rejected novel legal doctrines that would have overruled settled precedent and ultimately enlarged the power of the federal courts.
These decisions have been stridently misunderstood and mischaracterized by the mainstream media, which insist on characterizing these decisions as revolving around substantive policy questions: the wisdom of medical marijuana laws (Gonzalez) and redevelopment projects that require condemnation of private property (Kelo). Thus, the Court received widespread criticism for denying rights to medical marijuana users and property owners.
In fact, these decisions did not involve in the least the question of whether these groups of people deserve rights or whether the "war on drugs" or "urban renewal" represent good policy. Instead, these cases involve questions of judicial principle that transcend "liberal" or "conservative" labels: the extent to which federal courts can second-guess the judgments of elected officials. The fact that the majorities in both cases consisted of the Court's "liberals"
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