… is from George Will’s June 24, 2005 column, “Damaging ‘Deference’“; this column was written in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous Kelo v. City of New London decision, which was handed down ten years ago today. It is a decision that reinforced and expanded “Progressives'” tyrannical notion that government should be granted by U.S. courts great discretion in determining what government-orchestrated seizures of private property are in the “public interest”:
Those on the receiving end of the life-shattering power that the court has validated will almost always be individuals of modest means. So this liberal decision — it augments government power to aggrandize itself by bulldozing individuals’ interests — favors muscular economic battalions at the expense of society’s little platoons, such as homeowners and the neighborhoods they comprise.
Will ended this column by rightly criticizing those many conservatives who have come to adopt as a knee-jerk habit the practice of chanting “judicial restraint”:
Conservatives should be reminded to be careful what they wish for. Their often-reflexive rhetoric praises “judicial restraint” and deference to — it sometimes seems — almost unleashable powers of the elected branches of governments. However, in the debate about the proper role of the judiciary in American democracy, conservatives who dogmatically preach a populist creed of deference to majoritarianism will thereby abandon, or at least radically restrict, the judiciary’s indispensable role in limiting government.
