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The latest Associated Press-GfK poll shows that support for President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul has risen to its highest point since the survey started asking people about it in September.

The results now: 45 percent in favor, 42 percent opposed.

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New Jerseyans support the health care reform law passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama, a new Rutgers-Eagleton Poll shows. While a late February Rutgers-Eagleton Poll found that 48 percent of New Jersey residents now support the law, while 40 percent oppose it, and 12 percent don’t know. Support is slightly lower among registered voters at 47 percent, with 41 percent opposing the bill.

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Over the course of the White House summit on health care reform, Republican members of Congress repeatedly reminded Americans of their opposition to the controversial individual mandate or requirement to purchase insurance.

In fact, says Len Nichols of the New America Foundation, the individual mandate was originally a Republican idea. “It was invented by Mark Pauly to give to George Bush Sr. back in the day, as a competition to the employer mandate focus of the Democrats at the time.”…

“We called this responsible national health insurance,” says Pauly. “There was a kind of an ethical and moral support for the notion that people shouldn’t be allowed to free-ride on the charity of fellow citizens.”

The policy was originally included in many Republican proposals including the proposals during the Clinton administration. The leading GOP alternative plan known as the 1994 Consumer Choice Health Security Act included the requirement to purchase insurance. Further, this proposal was based off of a 1990 Heritage Foundation proposal outlined a quality health system where “government would require, by law every head of household to acquire at least a basic health plan for his or her family.”

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those lawyers opposing gay marraige could not make a compelling legal argument against it

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The question of judicial activism is closely related to constitutional interpretation, statutory construction, and separation of powers.

Detractors of judicial activism charge that it usurps the power of the elected branches of government or appointed agencies, damaging the rule of law and democracy.[11] Defenders of judicial activism say that in many cases it is a legitimate form of judicial review, and that the interpretation of the law must change with changing times.

A third view is that so-called "objective" interpretation of the law does not exist. According to law professor Brian Z. Tamanaha, "Throughout the so-called formalist age, it turns out, many prominent judges and jurists acknowledged that there were gaps and uncertainties in the law and that judges must sometimes make choices."[12]

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But the current climate of hostility to the judiciary cannot be written off as a product of the lunatic fringe. Attacks on “activist judges”—a phrase that, like “the elites,” has become a code word for liberals—are regularly issued by Republican officeholders from the White House to state legislatures. The assault on an independent judiciary has always been an integral part of the Rovian political strategy that put President George W. Bush in office.

The truth is that the real issue is not the activism of judges but the principles upon which they are acting.

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An Activist Judge is an liberal, Communist, freedom-hating, Hate America Firster, Ivy League graduated, member of the Blame America First Crowd who is part of an entire collective of mind-linked activist judges who think that they can undermine the president while menstruating the entire time they're on the bench.

The "juristocracy" is out of touch with the mainstream good Americans, and should be burned at the stake for heresy. Activist judges are stripping our nation of its moral fiber. Every American knows the importance of fiber in their diet, well our nation is no different. Our Great country is in need of a morality laxitive. America hasn't had a regular bowel movement in long time.

Activist judges would like to keep stripping America of its moral fiber until America's waste comes out the other end. Activist judges keep our nation constipated.

Activist judges would want to try and put The Greatest President Ever, George W. Bush in jail if they had a chance. They hate everything that has to do with justice. They are just "acting" is if they are on the side of justice but real patriotic Americans know they are really bears in a robe.

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One of the great successes of the legal wing of the conservative movement is the widespread connection in the mind of many citizens and pundits of "liberal" judicial philosophy with "activism," and "conservatism" with "strict constructionism." They'd have us believe that "liberal activist" and "conservative constructionist" are basically redundancies, and that there simply is no such thing as a conservative activist. This is patently untrue.

There is a very simple explanation for why a conservative may be activist and a liberal statist--the state of the law. The Warren Court wanted to overturn precedents, and so it ruled laws passed by Congress and (especially) state legislatures unconstitutional. And as the Court of that era slowly and sometimes not-so-slowly changed the law, the justices by definition needed to be less activist as the state of the law became more amenable to their views--precisely because they had changed the law.

But guess what? The Rehnquist Court did the same thing, as Republican-appointed justices found the laws passed by state legislatures and (especially) Congress during the years of the Great Society and thereafter to be out of line with the political and judicial philosophies they brought to the bench. Accordingly, they ruled to change the law too. Or--if we can pause a moment to act like adults and not be cowed by scary phrases devised by Federalist Society types to be used incessantly during hearings like the one presently underway to confirm Sonia Sotomayor--the Rehnquist Court trafficked heavily in "judge-made law."

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While some have decried the actions of conservative judges as "activism," these accusations are largely unwarranted. Typically, rulings by conservative judges simply correct liberal activism. In fact, by definition, a genuinely conservative judge will not engage in activism, as he will have a proper understanding of and respect for the role of the judiciary as envisioned by the Founding Fathers. By definition, then, any consistently activist judge is engaging in a liberal interpretation of this role. While judicial activism is a pervasive problem, certain judges have gone beyond the pale in pushing a liberal agenda on the American public.

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“I define activist as when you make the law rather than interpret the law or apply it,” (Gov. Matt Blunt of Misouri told reporters last week), as he answered questions about his plans to fill a Supreme Court vacancy created by former Chief Justice Ronnie M. White's resignation.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Laura Denvir Stith said: “In general, judicial activism has been defined as a court reaching a result based either on the personal views of the members of the court - or on the views of others, such as special interest groups or popular opinion - rather than based on the facts and the law. As a practical matter, though, people do not give the term activist a static, or consistent, definition.

“Instead, politicians and others usually use the term activist to describe any particular judicial decision with which they disagree, without regard to the underlying facts and law of the case.”

But John Elliott of the Adam Smith Foundation and St. Louis lawyer Bill Placke, president of the St. Louis Federalist Society, both said “Black's Law Dictionary” provides a legal definition all should follow, that judicial activism is “a philosophy of decision-making whereby judges allow their personal views about public policy, among other factors, to guide their decision.”

Placke, who emphasized his responses to the News Tribune questionnaire were his own, and not the Federalist Society's opinions. He said "judicial activism is “a term used by political commentators to describe a tendency by judges to consider outcomes, attitudinal preferences, and other public policy issues in interpreting applicable existing law. ... It is also used pejoratively to describe judges who endorse a particular agenda.”

Sara Schuett, director of the Missouri Association of Trial Lawyers, noted: “Strictly speaking, an activist judge misinterprets or ignores the law (or legal precedence) due to personal opinion or agenda.

Judge Roy Richter of the Eastern District Appeals Court in St. Louis, wrote: “Seemingly, any decision that reverses prior case law (absent some intervening statutory change) would constitute activism.”

But Charley German, president of the Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association, said: “The phrase activist judges has ... no definition and doesn't deserve one - it really means only that the person using that invective doesn't like a particular court decision.”

Victor Howard, Chief Judge of the Western District Appeals Court in Kansas City, said not all laws are written clearly, and may be “vague, ambiguous or in conflict with other statutes. Consequently interpreting the statute can be difficult. ... But politics or personal interest has no role in our analysis.”

Justice Stith said: “The Supreme Court usually hears only the most difficult - and sometimes the most controversial - legal issues. ... Judges must, and do, decide these cases based on the law, even if they do not personally agree with that law.”

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