With all the brou-ha-ha about gay marriages and the amendment, nearly every piece written about the topic involves the phrase "activist judges". We need to take back the courts from "activist judges [who] habitually manipulate the law to reflect current (and ever-changing) social trends or to meet the demands of leftist political groups."
But what does that mean, anyway?
That quote was from Jerry Fallwell, in a column he wrote the day after the SOTU Address in which Bush first mentioned "Activist Judges".
I googled my heart out trying to find earlier examples of this phrase, and nearly every hit I could find that contained the phrase were in support of the gay marriages. It was used by the NRDC to describe judges who voted consistently against environmental causes, and it was also used by the "Minnesota Family Council" to describe those in the Court who struck sound the sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas.
The ones closer to the SOTU address surrounded the phrase with quotation marks, but at some point they lost them and simply became a phrase that simply Was. Activist judges! By definition, a judge who uses "direct, often confrontational action, such as a demonstration or strike, in opposition to or support of a cause."
So, when did this happen? To what was Bush referring in the SOTU that caused him to rail against judges that take such egregious liberties with the constituion to further their own mean? From where I sit, the most well-known ruling I can think of in which that happened was.. well, Bush v. Gore. And we all know how that one turned out.
It's another one of those phrases which seems to have taken on a meaning greater than the sum of the two words.