This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 4, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama is asking the Supreme Court to uphold his health care law because to do otherwise

would be unprecedented and a gross exercise

in what he calls judicial activism.

Robert McNamara is an attorney at the Institute for Justice, he says the president's

claims are nonsense, and that judicial activism is a meaningless term.

President Obama has used the term judicial activism to describe what the Supreme Court would be doing were it to overturn, I think basically any part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

He says that it's not just my opinion that the law is constitutional it's the

opinion of a whole lot of constitutional law professors and academics and

judges and lawyers who have examined this law even if they are not

particularly sympathetic to this particular piece of legislation or my presidency.

So when he uses the term judicial activism, what does he mean and how do conservatives use the term judicial activism?

Clearly he's trying to bait conservatives in some way.

It seems like President Obama means the same thing when he says judicial activism that

conservatives mean when they say judicial

activism and that is basically a decision I personally disagree with. Judicial

activism is is no longer a term of debate. It is at best an insult it's a conclusion it says a decision that I disagree

with instead of talking about judicial activism which is really a meaningless phrase we

should be talking about whether the court got it right we should be talking about whether the court got it right.

We should be talking about whether a decision is correct or incorrect,

and whether the judges properly engaged, whether they were engaged with the facts of

...