This Los Angeles Times article on President Obama’s search for a consensus-building justice includes this strange sentence:

A high priority on judicial restraint is not a new concept for Obama, a constitutional lawyer who taught for years at the University of Chicago Law School, a bastion of conservative legal thought.

The notion that a “high priority on judicial restraint is not a new concept for Obama” may be true in the limited sense, say, that a “high priority on capitalism was not a new concept for Marx” or that a “high priority on marital fidelity was not a new concept for Bill Clinton.” In other words, Obama has surely been familiar with the concept of judicial restraint and with the fact that other folks give it high priority, but what evidence is there that he ever did (other than as rhetorical camouflage)?

Let’s not forget that Obama’s notorious empathy standard for Supreme Court justices—which is a recipe for lawless judicial activism—was not some slip of the tongue. Rather, Obama spelled out that standard at length in the carefully prepared Senate floor statement that he delivered to explain why he was voting against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts. He repeated that standard while running for president, including in a July 2007 speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. There is every reason to believe that that standard reflects Obama’s considered judgment. (For more, see my 2007 essay, which first exposed Obama’s empathy standard.)

Obama’s empathy standard is so deeply unpopular with the American public that Obama is now trying to run away from it. He’s found it convenient to demagogue the Court’s ruling in Citizens United as an exercise in conservative judicial activism. Never mind that the Court majority adopted the very holding that the ACLU urged. (Since when is agreeing with the ACLU on First Amendment speech to be disparaged by the Left as “conservative”?) He’s now trying to hide his empathy standard behind the banner of judicial restraint. No one should take him seriously.