It's not okay this time because it's your side that's doing it.

Judicial activism, the saying goes, is any court decision that you don't like. I've criticized conservatives for cherry-picking the judicial activism to which they object, so now it's liberals' turn.

In this column, E. J. Dionne excoriates the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court as “judicial activists” for wanting to strike down the individual mandate in health-care reform. Rather than deign to address their position on its Constitutional merits, he uses language that could have been copied and pasted from conservative screeds against liberal “judicial activists”:

[L]egislative power is supposed to rest in our government’s elected branches. * * * It was nice to be reminded that we’re a democracy, not a judicial dictatorship.

Regardless of your views of the individual mandate or of health-care reform in general, there is just no principled reason for defending Constitutional limitations on government power only when your team favors them.