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 Bolick.

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.

Molick 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

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