Maybe it’s time for George Will to ditch the bow tie. I have visions of him walking down a snowy street in Greenwich Village with his hands in his jeans pockets and a girl clinging to his arm, like The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, humming to himself that when it comes to the Constitution, “the answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” It sure ain’t anywhere in the text or history of the document itself.

Ten days after publishing his paean to the living Constitution, in which he greeted the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage with equanimity, Will now unloads on Chief Justice Roberts for daring to associate the self-evident absurdities of Justice Kennedy’s opinion in the Obergefell case with the long-discredited decision in Lochner v. New York, now once again fashionable among judicial activists of libertarian stripe.

Mr. Will, as I’ve remarked before, is not really interested in history, least of all his own. Years ago he recognized that Lochner stands for judicial legislating, the willful invention of rights that cannot be found in the Constitution, but that judges regard as important enough to invoke, from some cloud their gifted eyes can penetrate, in order to countermand the choices made by the people’s elected legislators. Now he writes as though the Constitution licensed judges to invoke “the natural-rights tradition (including the Declaration of Independence) and the Ninth Amendment” to decide cases in which individuals complain that a law represents “rent-seeking” by well-connected interest groups. But there is not a “no rent-seeking” provision in the Constitution. Indeed, Federalist No. 10 anticipates exactly this behavior, and provides for democratic means of coping with it, without reliance on the judiciary.

Then, Will was a prudent skeptic on the subject of judicial power. Now, he applauds the work of Justice Don Willett of the Texas Supreme Court, who is happily Lochnerizing the “due course of the law of the land” clause (the functional equivalent of “due process of law”) of the Texas constitution. The trouble is that, apart from ritual nods in the direction of the policymaking power of the legislature, Willett’s opinion in the case Will cites is a string of begged questions about imaginary “constitutional rights.” The stupid, the “irrational,” the unjust, the “rent-seeking”—these are all interchangeable with “the unconstitutional” for a judge like Willett, whose opinion relies more on Smith, Hayek, and Friedman than on any recognizable legal principles.

George Will is already plumping for the next Republican president to put Don Willett on the U.S. Supreme Court. Constitutional conservatives should decline this imprudent suggestion, remembering this simple lesson: Who says yes to Lochner cannot convincingly say no to Obergefell. The fact that George Will says yes to both should be a sufficient reminder of the danger of following his advice.