A couple readers wanted to know what I was talking about when I mentioned Brit Hume’s encapsulation of judicial activism. Here’s the relevant portion of the transcript. He delivered this on the fly, and I thought it was very well done:

KONDRACKE: No. No, no, no, no. There is no — look, unless the president comes up with somebody who is way out in right field, I don’t think that there’s any chance that the Gang of 14 agreement, which ensures that there will not be a filibuster, is going to break up, you know?
So if he nominates — and I think that he would have to nominate somebody who’s really a fire brand, which is unlikely. So, you know, I think that Judge Roberts, though, is not a judicial activist, a conservative judicial activist. He doesn’t sound like one. He says…
HUME: That’s a contradiction in terms.
KONDRACKE: Well, no, it’s not.
LIASSON: No, it’s not.
KONDRACKE: Look, somebody who — like one of the people who sounds like a judicial fire brand is Janice Rogers Brown, who, in various speeches, has talked about returning the state of the law to where it was before the New Deal, when socialism was inflicted on America, that kind of thing.
HUME: But judicial activism refers to a particular judicial philosophy in which there is great elasticity in the Constitution and that is found to permit and guarantee all sorts of things not there before.
(CROSSTALK)
LIASSON: That’s liberal judicial activism.
HUME: Liberals don’t like the term. That’s what the phrase means.
Liberals have decided that that’s disadvantageous to them, because Republicans have succeeded, or conservatives have succeeded, in demonizing the idea of judicial activism. So they invented a new concept of judicial activism, which is judges who are willing to hold certain congressional actions up to the light of the Constitution. And when they found the Constitution doesn’t permit them, they strike them down. That’s almost the opposite of judicial activism.