Obama and the Courts

Very interesting New Yorker article about Obama and his court appointments, as well as his fairly well-known political philosophy - not ideological, but pragmatic, yet focused much more on having an impact on the legislative rather than the judicial branch.  It really made me think that the Right's emphasis on the courts right now clearly embraces judicial activism, despite its rhetoric - one of the passages which led to that thought is the following (it's developed further in the piece).  I had no idea the judicial history of the 2nd Amendment had played out in this way given recent history:

As proof of this hypothesis, the authors point to the history of the Second Amendment and gun control. The first clause of the amendment refers to the need for “a well regulated Militia” and the second states that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” For many decades, into the nineteen-eighties, it was widely agreed among judges and scholars that the right to bear arms belonged only to militias, and thus the Second Amendment imposed no limits on the ability of states and localities to enact gun-control laws. Warren E. Burger, the former Chief Justice (and no liberal), said that any other view of the law was a “fraud,” and Robert Bork, the conservative hero, said much the same thing. But Meese and his allies in the National Rifle Association were indefatigable in pushing an opposing interpretation, and their position became widely adopted, first in the Republican Party and then among many Democrats. Finally, in 2008, the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Antonin Scalia (who was appointed while Meese was attorney general), struck down a District of Columbia gun-control law as a violation of the Second Amendment. A fringe position—a “fraud”—two decades earlier had become the law of the land. To Balkin, this is an entirely appropriate example of what he, Siegel, and Robert Post, the dean of Yale Law School, call Democratic Constitutionalism. “Conservatives convinced other people that their vision of the Constitution was a better one, they won elections, they appointed their people to the Court,” Balkin said. “This is not lawlessness. This is how the system works.”