I’m not always in agreement with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial take on judicial matters. But I don’t think I’ve ever found it as off base as in its piece today on the Wisconsin supreme court’s outlandish ruling yesterday on abortion.

As I spelled out in my post on the ruling, the court by a vote of 4 to 3 ruled that the laws that the Wisconsin legislature enacted post-Roe to operate within the constricted space that Roe allowed it somehow impliedly repealed its longstanding statute barring non-therapeutic abortions (section 940.04(1)). The dissenters soundly assailed the ruling as a “jaw-dropping exercise of judicial will” and as “pure policymaking, driven by antagonism toward a law the majority does not like.”

The WSJ likes the “rough political compromise” that results from the ruling—“a ban on abortion after 20 weeks, a parental-consent requirement for minors, and a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion is performed”—and it doesn’t seem to care how the majority got there or whether it’s a court’s role to impose a “rough political compromise.” It depicts section 940.04(1) as an antiquated law that “hasn’t been enforced,” but doesn’t point out that it was the Roe regime that prevented the law’s enforcement and that the legislature had amended the law as recently as 2011.

The WSJ even hails the majority’s ruling as an “act of judicial restraint”! How so? Because by contriving to find that the legislature had impliedly repealed the state’s longstanding abortion law, the majority didn’t need to rule that the law violated the state constitution. In other words, because its ruling forestalled an even worse act of judicial activism, it should somehow be praised as judicial restraint.

The WSJ says that “Wisconsin seems to have come out in a place most voters can accept, which is a benefit of letting states and their voters decide rather than pre-empt them as Roe v. Wade did.” But the right way to find out what voters in Wisconsin “can accept” would have been for the state supreme court to leave revision of 940.04(1) to the democratic processes.

It’s quite possible, to be sure, that the democratic processes would promptly have yielded an abortion regime even more permissive than the “settlement terms” the court imposed, and have swung the Wisconsin legislature to the left in the process. If you think so, those might be reasons to welcome the court’s ruling. But let’s not pretend that it was well reasoned or even plausible, much less praiseworthy as an “act of judicial restraint.”