From our friends at Public Discourse, more on the effects of Citizens United, as Carson Holloway, a political scientist, explains why the concept of “strict scrutiny” is alien to the Constitution and why it poses a threat to a constitutionally defensible judicial review:

The Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding corporate spending on political advocacy—Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—provoked the widespread renewal of a longstanding liberal complaint: namely, that the conservative critique of judicial activism is mere hypocrisy. In this case, it was suggested, conservative justices, applauded by conservative commentators, struck down a democratically enacted law and overturned long established judicial precedents. Surely, the argument runs, this is judicial activism, and surely it reveals the critique of judicial activism as just a convenient tool by which conservatives decry decisions to which they object for political reasons, cloaking their real concerns in feigned constitutional principles.

Though common, this charge of hypocrisy sheds little real light on the questions in relation to which it is invoked, for several reasons. First, it does nothing to help us determine the relative merits of the liberal and conservative positions with regard to the proper exercise of the judicial power. After all, the charge clearly cuts both ways. In regard to Citizens United, liberals have complained not only about conservative inconsistency on the matter of judicial activism, but also about the supposed activism of the decision itself. Thus conservatives might well ask these liberal critics: where was your hot indignation about judicial activism when the Court, as recently as nineteen months ago, issued its ruling in Boumediene v. Bush? In that case, the Court, to widespread liberal acclaim, reinterpreted key precedents and struck down Congressional enactments on the basis of a hitherto unknown right of alien enemy combatants to habeas corpus review. Liberals no less than conservatives, it seems, can be charged with a selective opposition to judicial activism.

[Read the rest here.]

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