"It must be nice living in a fantasy world where every law you like is constitutional and every Supreme Court decision you don't is 'activist.'"

Said Senator Orrin Hatch, commenting on President Obama's preemptive attack on a Supreme Court opinion that would strike down the health care law. Obama, referring to the Court as "an unelected group of people," said "I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

Now, obviously, Obama's attack on the Court is vulnerable to the criticism that it's incoherent because there are other times when he honors the Court precisely because it does strike down laws passed by democratically elected legislatures. Indeed, he seems to use his democratically obtained power to appoint Supreme Court Justices who will, for example, strike down democratically enacted laws restricting abortion. He will lavish praise on the life-tenured, aloof-from-politics judges who produce decisions he likes.

Which brings me back to Hatch's quote: "It must be nice living in a fantasy world where every law you like is constitutional and every Supreme Court decision you don't is 'activist.'"

I had to laugh.

Because I've been living in that fantasy world for almost 30 years.

It's called the legal academy.

Amongst the conlawprofs, it's an idea so standard as to be boringly banal: The courts should vigorously enforce individual rights, confidently stepping up to a countermajoritarian role, but when it comes to the "structural" parts of the Constitution — like federalism and separation of powers — the courts should defer to Congress.