This is longtime Cato Daily podcast host, Caleb Brown. I've hosted the Cater Daily podcast for nearly 18 years, but no more.

But I wanted to leave loyal listeners with some favorite episodes that I hope ring true and relevant to our current moment.

This is one of them. Thank you for listening.

This is the Cato Daily podcast for Thursday, September 1st, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown. Judicial activism in

defensive liberty is no vice, so says Goldwater Institute litigation director Clint Bollick. He argues

that conservative complaints about what may be rightly termed judicial engagement miss the mark when

it comes to how courts secure our rights.

Mollick is the author of the Cato book, David's Hammer.

We spoke in Phoenix, Arizona, earlier this week.

During the Clinton administration, one of the popular conservative hammering points,

I won't even call them talking points, was this idea of judicial activism,

that activist judges are not applying the law, that their only role is to apply the law,

and it, I feel like, was meant to tell the judicial branch, you just let Congress handle this or you let the president

handle these things. You need to limit your role when it comes to the rules that govern the United

States. Is that fair to say? I think that's fair to say, and it was hopelessly, internally

inconsistent. You had people like Mark Levin, on the one hand, saying that laws ought to be

deferred to because of popular will unless he happened to not like the law. And probably the paradigm example is one of

the most activist decisions in the history of the country, Bush versus Gore. George W. Bush was

elected at the behest of the judiciary, and I didn't hear a heck of a lot of conservatives complaining

about that. It seems like that talking point has sort of died down, though.

You know, during the Bush years, it seemed like that was not as big of a complaint.

I think that it has died down a little bit because one of the great things that Barack Obama has done for this country is to inspire Americans to read the Constitution

...