So is John McCain. Aside from tinkering with the tax code and coming up with an entitlement here and there, America's 'lawmakers', as newspapers still quaintly refer to elected representatives, no longer, in any meaningful sense, make laws - not the ones which govern our lives. Instead, what they mainly do is protest their impotence to do anything very much at all, other than try to come up with something that brings them into compliance with the whims of the judiciary. You can find new examples every week across the Western world, but, to pluck one close to home, here in New Hampshire my own legislature is struggling to come up with a new education-funding system and a new tax structure for the state. It's been pretty much the same for 200 years, but suddenly it's ,unconstitutional' and has to go.
Judicial activism is, of course, a famously American perversion.
In other countries within the English Common Law tradition, judges have tended to be fusty types disinclined to creative interpretation of statutes whose meaning seemed plain to one and all. But not any more. The judges have got with the beat. In London at least, as we learnt during the Pinochet case, a judge can still be rapped on the knuckles if he fails to spot any potential conflict of interest between the case he's presiding over and his various extra-curricular enthusiasms. My current favourite is Canadian Supreme Court Justice Claire L'Heureux-Dube.