Antidemocratic Liberals and Democratic Conservatives. The politics of Federal Court appointments

A really rich and oddly ignored aspect of the politics of Federal Court appointments is that political liberals opt for judicial liberals who are heavily antidemocratic.

That would seem to be contrary to the "liberal" impulse, but in fact it isn't.

This is very loudly pronounced in terms of judicial appointments.  Right now, political liberals, to include a large number of lawyers, as lawyer tend to be politically liberal, are whining and crying that Anthony Kennedy's long overdue departure from the Supreme Court means the end of the Republic. . . by which they mean they're worried that the people might get to vote on stuff.

Horror of horrors.

Judicial liberals haven't always operated in this fashion, but following the voting rights expansions of the 50s and 60s, which they supported, they have.  That has been, in fact, the hallmark of their viewpoint.

Take, for example, the topic of abortion.  No matter how else a person might wish to phrase the issue, the real impact of Roe v. Wade was to remove the topic from state legislatures.  At least one state had moved towards opening up abortion, no matter what a person might think of it.  Others had opposed such moves in no uncertain terms.  The Supreme Court decided to remove the issue from the voters entirely and declare, in Platonic Oligarchic fashion, what people's rights and burdens were, irrespective of what they wanted to do.

All the subsequent argument over the Supreme Court decision has kept that feature.  The argument isn't phrased in that fashion, or even conceived of in that fashion, but that's a prime feature of it.  When this argument is presented as an argument for "reproductive freedom", or whatever, what the pro abortion politicians are really arguing is "For goodness sakes, don't let this go to the voters as they don't agree with us."

It isn't just this issue either.  Kennedy's Obergefell decision is a prime example of it.  Kennedy and his fellow travelers jumped the gun on what was felt to be an evolving trend in state legislatures in what looks like an effort to be hip and cool and declare in one swoop what they felt would likely be a decade or more political debate.

And judges deciding an issue because they don't like political debate is antidemocratic.

In contrast, conservative jurists tend, one way or another, to just apply laws as written and figure if people don't like them, they'll rewrite them.

And that's what the liberal debate about a new Supreme Court justice is all about.

Political liberals don't trust you at the ballot box to think they way they do, so they want judges to decree in dictatorial fashion what you ought to think.  Peasant.