Activist judges, racial preferences, the stakes in this election: this story’s got it all. Terrence Pell, head of the Center for Individual Rights, has a piece out today called, “By Any Means Necessary,” about an outrageous attempt by a Democrat-appointed federal judge to maneuver the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative off the ballot. The “Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary” is the group trying to stop Michigan’s voters from exercising their right, guaranteed by Michigan’s constitution, to decide issues by ballot. When a group’s name implies that it will resort to violence, if necessary, to maintain racial preferences, it does not inspire confidence in their tactics.

Ever since the Supreme Court’s disappointing decision on the fate of so-called “affirmative action” at the University of Michigan, this issue has been on the back-burner for conservatives. But the truth is, we have it in our power to turn this issue around. The impact of a voter-passed initiative to stop racial preferences in the very state that was the site of the ill-conceived Supreme Court decision would be huge. Victory in Michigan would completely reverse the momentum on race preferences nationally. That is exactly why a coalition of self-proclaimed radicals is doing everything and anything it can to prevent voters from deciding this issue. It’s also why a liberal judge is turning somersaults to help them. Marriage is by no means the only issue on which activist judges step in to thwart the democratic process.

As Pell points out, the implications of this case go far beyond affirmative action. If the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative is kept off the ballot through trumped-up charges against the campaign for the initiative, the courts will have a precedent for rolling back elections in which they claim that campaigns have been “misleading.” I happen to think the term “affirmative action” is inherently misleading. In my view, a proper interpretation of “civil rights” means that racial preferences are illegitimate. But some see it the other way around. To them, calling a referendum that would roll back so-called “affirmative action” a “civil rights initiative” is itself misleading, as is a campaign for such an initiative that does not advertise itself as an attack on “affirmative action” and civil rights. These differences in framing are the stuff of politics. To allow the courts to step in and adjudicate elections based on biased conceptions of whether political campaigns are fair or not is a prescription for a slow-motion judicial coup. Then again, judicial usurpation has been the order of the day in this country for some time now.

The judicial outrage in Michigan is a timely reminder of the stakes in this election. Conservatives can win. We can take an issue like racial preferences, on which we seemed to have lost (through the courts, of course), and win a major victory by democratic means. The public is with us on this, as it is on so many other issues. But determined opponents, allied with activist judges, will stop conservatives across a broad spectrum of issues, if we allow the Democrats to keep Republican-appointed judges off the courts. We cannot afford two-years of mess-up on this, as a federal judge in Michigan has just made all-too-clear.