John McCain's graceful and serious speech this week at Wake Forest University puts one of the most important issues of 2008 squarely in focus. Will social policy in the USA continue to be made by panels of unelected judges with lifetime tenure, or will we have a judiciary governed by self-restraint and fidelity to the rule of law?
With clarity as well as a personal history of fairness in judicial matters, McCain laid out the case for a judicial branch that rises above political strife but does not undermine representative government. To some critics of his view that judges should interpret and not make the law, the debate is merely about different forms of judicial activism — liberal vs. conservative.