by Matt Barr

Reaganite = libertarian

Prof. Althouse seems to agree with Michael Kinsley that these are the three types of judicial conservatism (quote from Althouse's post):

First, conservatism can mean a deep respect for precedent and a reluctance to reverse established doctrines....

Second, a conservative can mean someone who reads the Constitution narrowly and is reluctant to overrule the elected branches of government....

The third meaning of conservative as applied to judges is a conservative judicial activist: someone who uses the power of the courts to impose conservative policies, with or without the benefit of a guiding philosophy.

If this really is it, then Reagan hasn't left the conservative movement, it's left him. Reaganite conservatism, which I guess is libertarianism now, would say that courts should cleave to the principle that ours is a limited government of enumerated powers, and should be wary of (and strike down) encroachments onto our liberty. (Sort of Ed Brayton's "originalism" from the previous post.)

This certainly is not overadherence to precedent or established doctrines, inasmuch as most of those since the New Deal are quite contrary to this formulation. It's not deference to the elected branches, if anything, it tilts away from them. And it's not results oriented, in its purest form, unless you want to get hyperliteral and describe results which favor liberty over regulation as a "result," not a process.

Anyway, by now it's needless to say, but I'm this fourth kind. Didn't you just defend Scalia's Raich concurrence in your last post? Nuanced, aren't I?

It's the 25th anniversary of the first Reagan landslide, by the way, not to mention this blog's first anniversary. (It was mattbarr.com/blog.php at the time and run on Blogger.)

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