In his weekly National Journal column (currently available here), Stuart Taylor takes on a crazed New York Times editorial (pardon the redundancy) on the Court’s recent term as well as a badly misguided E.J. Dionne essay (which Jonathan Adler and I addressed and which somehow ended up being published both by the New Republic and the Washington Post).
As Taylor points out in dry understatement, if one must resort to crude political terms to describe the justices, “Roberts and Alito are ‘far-right’ [the Times editorial’s label] and ‘radical’ (as Times columnist Frank Rich has called them) only to people who are themselves more than a little bit to the left on the public opinion spectrum.” Further, “it’s misleading to brand as ‘far-right’ and ‘radical’ positions that in fact are more liberal than, or near the center of, mainstream public opinion.”